You see them frequently and if you don’t take care, you will actually feel guilty. I believe there is some sort of telepathy going on, at least to explain the empathy that I feel now and then. From many of the people that passes me when strolling in a forest, or through the heather, from these people fast and sweating and reverberating vibes of being energetic, young and determined, from them I get the wish of walking faster myself, sweat in the brow and sights firmly fixed in the horizon, with a face incapable to understand any other being slower. I get to feel guilty for walking slow, and I admire their resolve.
But I actually feel sorry for them. Afterwards that is.
What I really like from whatever might be called my generation, and certainly the next ones, is that there is an increasing awareness of nature. Go back thirty ago and the idea of having a stroll in the woods for regaining some sort of peace was seen as weird, or plain stupid. I believe that already in the eighties there was an increased awareness of being fit as a desirable life goal, with all the rise of jogging first, and aerobics later. Of course, it was the eighties, and it all was surrounded by an edonist egocentric wibe, but never mind that. The effects of having more sport in your life are good for you, no matter what your motivations are. But actually, let’s mind the motivations.
I do think that all these hard walkers nowadays are the spiritual descendents of Jane Fonda suffering in the TV for the sake of a better figure.
Let’s go back to those that have taken the outdoors as their private gym. In principle I should not care. I am not more the owner of the outdoors than anybody else, so I do not own the proper way to be outdoors. And yet, I do believe that those fit fanatics that go through the paths as if training for their next marathon are missing something. Just look at their eyes. Focused, one could say. But focused on what? Focused in the wings of falcon that just crossed our path twenty meters above our heads? Or on the slug delicately stretching its antennas to touch, and read, and comprehend the flower few milimiters ahead? Or in the always changing shapes that clouds take, reminding us, or at least me, that we are tiny irrelevant creatures on a very very big surface?
You know the answer. Our sporting friends are focused in nothing like that. They are focused in their heart beat, in their proper breathing, in the cadence of their steps. In the time behind, and the time ahead, in the kilometers made. Greatly focused that is, so they will make distance, and burn calories and increase their speed, for sure they will. Also, they will miss the falcon, and the slug and the clouds. I am sure that my friends are better off that my grandparents, who worked their whole life’s and probably destroyed their body in the process. But I am also sure that this blindness for all that surround us, this great capacity of focusing in what we think we need ourselves, forgetting the place that we are going through, is not ok.
After all, that is what is warming our planet beyond recognition. Our great focus, in ourselves.