Woke up this morning like “Hey…I’m gonna do a thing.”

With my podcasts on hand, I left the house on a mission to just walk. To where and for how long, I didn’t know, but I was going to let my feet lead the way. I just wanted to sweat and essentially, justify any midday naps I may take despite how beautiful the weather was outside and all the activities there were to do. Hey, I’m an extroverted introvert; even interaction with the outdoors requires a period of recharge afterwards for me.

So, off on the walk I go, into a new neighborhood with beautiful single-family homes about .47 miles away from my house (according to my Apple Watch, which I think is broken because I’m sure I had already walked a mile at that point, tf) and it felt nice. Fresh air really is a kind of therapy. As I approached a crosswalk, I saw another black woman on a walk, and got super excited. We were about to intersect with each other and I thought maybe we could exchange a head nod, acknowledging brown chicks getting their workouts in on this sunny day, something, but she sure enough sped up, crossed the street and was huffing away before I could reach her.

K. I didn’t take it personally. I know having a chit chat while you’re walking a long distance is extra taxing on the body, so I let her have it. We could be solidarity sisters in my head.

BUT, she definitely looked like she knew where she was going, so I let her put some distance between us and essentially followed her (that sounded hella creepy, but I promise I stayed a minimum of 500ft behind her and OMG that sounds worse).

Know what? Let’s move on. So I went into the direction of the other walking individual and boy am I glad that I did. I stumbled onto a trail that led me to a lake where I saw people kayaking (like yo, this exists just a mile and some change from my house!) that was so shady and cool, it was a great break from the rising temperatures and walk I had no intention of taking. Glad that I did.

Once I got back on my original path, I experienced a phenomena that can only be described as the…”Outdoor Exercise People Vibe”? The name is a work in progress, but look, every person I came across jogging, or biking made eye contact with me and either said “Hello” or gave me a head nod. I started learning quickly that if I didn’t acknowledge these people that I was going to be fucking up the energy and I wouldn’t dare show my face around that path again. And look, the majority of these people giving me nods were white and that was wild. Like whoa. I haven’t experienced that much niceness from random white strangers as a new face in their streets since…

You know there was that one time when…

Oh no, when we went to Europe, they were totally…

You know what? Nevermind.