Walking the Gringo

Rediscovery

I write today to celebrate some recent, minor success of mine. The last time that I wrote a Substack post, I was lamenting my intensive social media use during a week in which I was sick three months ago. As the article suggested, I did delete Instagram from my phone and have not been back on since. I also have since blocked Facebook and Reddit from my computer (I now have access to none of the three on either device). I have taken these more drastic steps as I found that I was using them as an escape from the responsibilities of paperwork, shopping for my new apartment, cooking, cleaning, or doing homework/reading for my Master’s. When I would consider attempting harder, more stressful tasks, I would go to social media or chess as a compulsion. I knew that permitting my access to these things would only make it harder to get anything done.

Of course, the use of these applications that I have decided are generally harmful to me took up some time. Often the time that it ate up could be considered “dead” or “numb” time where maybe I would not have been doing anything else. I remind myself that my personal use of social media could never be moderate enough to only exist within those times where I had little option to do anything else. It seemed that, for me, I could find little pockets of time to fill in with social media as well as great big pockets to fill with social media once the habit was built.

Now, what to do with these empty periods of time? I am still in the process of building good routines, but my approach has been a maximalist one-adding new activities instead of just subtracting the bad. If I had little else to do, then I would have no reason to be off of these applications.

I started with walking a couple of weeks ago. During my parents’ visit to Argentina, walking my mom and dad around Buenos Aires or Bariloche was a daily obligation. I was given the reminder that a simple walk ended up doing me a lot of good. Of course, my love for walking is well known by many of my friends and readers. The moniker “The Walking Gringo” was given to me while I was walking a round trip of 8 km every day to and from the school at which I was teaching. My main form of transportation in Santa Cruz was walking, even if the walk would take over an hour.

When my work moved with me into the apartments of Buenos Aires, I had no commute to give to my feet. The distances that I needed to traverse became quite small and the habit of sticking to my neighborhood for the majority of the week was built. Like a dog, staying inside and not going for my needed walk was a recipe for unhappiness.

The simple idea that I could go for a walk whenever I feel as though I don’t know what to do with myself has been a powerful addition to my day. Whether early or late, a walk has such little activation energy and can be paired with music, a podcast or a long voice note from a friend that I have no issue with getting out and going. The task of filling a day well when you have no plans at all seems to be best attacked with a long walk allowing the mind to wander and giving the body some inertia to move through the rest of the day. Now that I am walking, it is easier for the other “good” tasks to fill the cracks.

Although I was already doing these, I do find it easier to go to the gym, to cook, to clean and to read before bed instead of watching YouTube. I have also added in some new tasks like a short meditation each day and writing in a journal. I plan to continue to add good things so that I always have an option for a healthy way to spend time within reach (closer reach than unblocking a social media site and logging back in).

I was motivated to do this to stop escaping the scariest task of all, paperwork. I am slowly doing the paperwork. I don’t feel as overwhelmed by it anymore, I don’t feel like it will be impossible to get done, and I don’t feel like I wish I was doing other things than existing within the chess/scrolling black hole. Here’s to hoping that I stay walking, happy and healthy as life goes on.

From Some Walks: