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.
Yeah exercising folks can either be hella friendly or totally in the zone. No in between.
Haha, what about when you’re neither, which was me? I was just caught up listening to podcasts and not really in the zone of anything 🙃