Maison Notes
Walking used to simply be part of being alive.
Before we turned it into a metric. Before we strapped devices to our wrists to tell us whether we’d done enough of it, whether the pace was right, whether it counted. Before we started “earning” movement and “optimizing” effort, and feeling quietly guilty about a Sunday afternoon stroll that didn’t register as a workout.
I’ve been walking every single day for over 1,700 days. And the most important thing I can tell you about it is this: most of those days, it didn’t feel like anything remarkable at all. It just felt like going outside.
What Walking Is Not
Let me say this plainly, because I think it matters.
Walking is not punishment. It is not punishment for eating, or for aging, or for existing in a body that has changed or struggled or taken up space in ways you weren’t always at peace with. It is not only valuable if it burns calories. It is not only meaningful if it’s tracked. It is not a requirement to become smaller, and it is not a productivity hack, and it is not something you owe anyone – including yourself – as penance for being human.
I’ve lost over 130 pounds. That fact lives somewhere inside every walk I take, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the walking didn’t start as punishment, and sustaining it for nearly five years has required me to make sure it never became that. The moment a habit becomes something you do to yourself rather than something you do for yourself, it starts to rot from the inside.
The streak has survived because walking is not, for me, about becoming smaller. It’s about staying sane. Staying present. Staying connected to a life I’m actively trying to inhabit rather than just get through.
What Walking Actually Gives
On a good day, I notice things.
The way light changes through different seasons – the particular quality of a winter morning versus a July afternoon. A bird I can’t name. A neighbor’s garden that’s further along than last week. The way a storm feels in the air before it arrives. These small observations accumulate into something. I’m not sure I can name it precisely, but it feels like attention. Like the practice of paying attention to a world that doesn’t require anything of me in return.
Walking also creates rhythm in a day that might otherwise blur into itself. There’s something about the transition of going outside – the door, the air, the shift in scale – that interrupts the indoor loops my mind can get stuck in. Grief processes differently on a walk. Stress metabolizes. Creative problems that had calcified overnight occasionally solve themselves somewhere around the third block. I’ve planned more meals, written more sentences, and worked through more difficult emotions on walks than I ever have sitting still.
And then there’s what I can only call embodiment – the experience of actually being in a body that is moving through space in the most ancient, human-scaled way possible. We were not designed to experience our lives entirely through screens and chairs. Walking is not a remedy for that, exactly, but it’s a daily reminder that there is a physical world, and I am a physical person in it, and that matters in ways that are hard to articulate but easy to feel.
The Days I Almost Didn’t Go
I want to be honest about the hard days, because a streak of 1,700 is not a story about perfect conditions.
The early days were the hardest, not because of physical difficulty, but because I didn’t yet trust myself. I had started and stopped enough times in my life to know that good intentions weren’t the same as follow-through, and there was a voice that said this time won’t be different that I had to walk past, literally, every single morning.
There have been sick days. Days of grief where going outside felt impossible, and I went anyway, slowly, without trying to make it meaningful. Days of bad weather where the walk was ten minutes around the block just to say I’d done it. Days when something in my life had cracked open, and I didn’t know what to do with myself, and walking was the only answer I had.
Some seasons were heavier than others. Some stretches I barely remember. What I know is that I never once came back inside wishing I hadn’t gone.
The Most Sustainable Habit May Also Be the Simplest
Here’s what walking requires: shoes. A door. The willingness to go through it.
No membership. No equipment beyond the most basic. No specific window of time, no minimum distance, no performance standard. It is one of the oldest human acts, and it remains one of the most accessible, which is precisely why wellness culture doesn’t know what to do with it. You can’t sell walking very easily. You can’t optimize it into something unrecognizable and then charge a subscription fee. It’s just you and the world, and your body moving through it at a pace that feels human.
We often ignore the simplest things because they aren’t marketable. I think that’s worth noticing.
Walking as a Way of Seeing
I am a visual person, and I’ve come to understand that walking is part of how I see.
Chefs walk markets. Photographers walk cities. Writers walk to unstick things. Artists have always known that the body moving through space does something to perception that sitting still cannot replicate. There is a long and quiet history of people doing their best thinking on foot, and I’ve become convinced it’s not incidental.
Some of my clearest moments of understanding – about food, about light, about what I actually think about something- have arrived on walks. Not because I was trying to think, but because I had given my mind enough space to wander toward something true.
The Walk Is the Point
I don’t walk to arrive somewhere. Not anymore.
I walk because I’m alive and my body is capable of it, and I want to honor that quietly, without drama. I walk because my mind needs air. I walk because 1,700 days ago I made a decision to take care of myself in the most unglamorous, unmarketable, deeply human way I could think of – and that decision has compounded into something I don’t have adequate language for yet.
Some days the walk changes nothing. Some days it changes everything. Most days, it just changes the quality of the next hour, and that turns out to be enough.
You don’t need a streak. You don’t need a goal. You don’t need to track a single step.
You just need to go outside.
♥︎ Heather
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