walk this way

Emotions can run high or drop low. When it goes through cyclic peaks and troughs candies are the quickest way to subdue the fluctuations. Chocolate bars offer the much needed endorphins to suppress the down, empty, alone feeling one way or it can add up to an already positive state by jacking up the endorphin supply thereby prolonging the good feeling the other way. Candies, however, bring along with it sugar, and saturated fats(when derived from chocolates), and sometimes caffeine that overall, you are better off not having to eat these health hazards wrapped and prepared in tiny colorful packages hiding under the harmless guise of goodies and sweets.

Exercise is also a good way to get endorphins. Unlike candies, here you don't ingest the source rather you excite it with physical activity to get your body to produce the feel good hormones. I prefer walking to get my needed high. I was actually unaware that it had that effect cause I walked mostly to meditate and reflect. After every long walk I end up feeling calmed(if I started out agitated) or feeling better, energised(if I started out already in a good mood). I walk with an initial destination in mind but with the realisation that I can end up anywhere my walking leads me.

Father taught us the value of walking. The original idea was to save on money and exercise as well; hitting two birds with one stone he said. By opting to walk than to ride public transport we'd end up being richer both in wallet and in health&spirit. Our house is located a good 1km(thanks to the ruler function of google earth) from the major road outside so we'll have to do a significant deal of walking should we choose to. 1km is relative. For kids it may be asking too much but for a full grown adult, 1km is a breeze without having to expend too much energy cause their strides are longer and the number of steps, fewer.

I logged my first long walk when I was 10. It was a Saturday but a few of us went to school for a study group that never did pan out. Kudos to our teacher for the noble idea but taking away a child's precious Saturday for study was an ingredient to futility. I was already commuting to school so I'd no guardian with me. Russer, one of my classmates, was accompanied by his father. According to his old man, there was a public transport strike that hour so on the way home, we decided to walk instead of waiting, hoping to catch a few rogue drivers who might have somehow chosen not to cooperate with the strike. It was noon, the sun was scorching hot but Russer's father's smart storytelling amused us that before we knew it, we're already a few blocks from our houses. As per google earth that was 6km.

I took pride for that long walk. For children my age, that was a rare feat. It still pales in comparison to what my old man went thru as a child. He had to walk everday to and fro school and I saw for myself how far that was when I went to the place he grew up in. Nowadays it seems that much like how the average height increases with succeeding generations so does the pampering derived by the children, whose parents went thru difficult times, go. Life's difficulties and challenges are diminished with succeeding generations as the parents who experienced them strive to keep their children from experiencing the same.

It was the first of many long walks. Over the years, I would try to at least log one major walk per annum as a record of sorts. Walking huge distances was by choice. Somehow it bordered on absurdity but hey, it's me. It's my thing. While not truly a nature walk, walking somehow connects me to the world, albeit the urbanised kind. By walking I am reminded how vulnerable men are. Had ants been men we would have been eating dust lagging behind their trail. Ants? How did ants figure in all these musings? Funnny but usually I just pick the direction but never do I set a limit how far I will walk. And when I think I've already gone far, that will just rev up me up some more but when I look to the horizon to see how far I can still go, it gets me thinking how men minus their machines are but a speck from the overwhelming wide expanse of nature and its goings-on.

I usually walk along the road and it exposes me to harm's way cause there's no telling when a wayward vehicle would suddenly pop from nowhere and pop the life out of me. So I follow the old adage " walk against the traffic" which incidentally I heard first from Russer's pop, and yes, heard first during the famed first long walk. I see how poor the state of most people are as I pass by the shanties along the way. Seeing them while on a vehicle you don't experience the sights and sounds. Walking gets you up close and that makes all the difference. Walking allows me the chance to appreciate the rapid urban development and at the same time, get nostalgic, somehow sad, over how bricks and cements have suddenly supplanted the once lush greens that used to be there. I guess that's why men, unlike ants, are made less mobile. Our sense of appreciation will have been taken away in exchange for mobility. I don't want to be spending the monotonous life of an ant which is practically centered on: protect the queen, and work! Men had to be slow to further appreciate life. Slow and easy that's how it's supposed to go.

When I was in college, two of my college buddies Paolo and Marnie who were also my highschool classmates from school, went to Bicutan to attend the debut of our friend's sister. As luck would have it, a thunderstorm came. We took a jeep from Pasay and passing by Magallanes, lightning was darting everywhere. It was one of the few occassions when you could actually smell that the weather ain't gonna be good. You can smell it across the air. Celphone was but a luxury, so you guessed it, we didn't have any. There was no way of contacting Paz(the one with the sister) so while the continuous heavy downpour would have called all events that afternoon quits, until we saw and confirmed for ourselves, the debut party was still on. Traffic suddenly became heavy. Our jeep inched through the flooded roads and inside, we were like refugees being transferred to another resettlement camp. We braved the storm until we reached lower Bicutan. That area is a lowland. The flood coming from higher grounds was streaming like mad. Lightning was all over and the accompanying thunder will scare the wits out of you, it was 7 pm, we didnt have any jackets or umbrellas, and we were soaking wet even our notebooks were already left for waste. Nobody dared mutter what was obviously dawning to us as a bad idea. We should have called it quits earlier but us were a tight knit group that it would be a letdown for Paz if we couldnt be there. We couldnt move from where we got off. The flooding was halfway up my shin and as more and more people