Keep Walking

Ultimately, the only races I was running were the dash to the corner bodega in the morning to get a quart of beer or the meandering, nighttime bursts propelling me from one bar to the other along Columbus Avenue.

In sobriety, though, I’ve developed what people call “smart feet.” Those are feet that bring me to a meeting regardless of what my head is telling me. Time after time, in early sobriety, with thoughts, plans, recollections, multiple resentments and bitter recriminations swirling around in my mind like a bubbling ragout, I’d find myself suddenly walking down the steps to the meeting room, not exactly sure how I’d gotten from here to there. It was like having a blackout sober. But rather than walking backwards away from help, my feet were taking me toward it.

I walked a lot in the first couple of months of sobriety. Back and forth, up and down Broadway. Sometimes with people, other times alone. Many were the nights I’d leave a meeting, talking with a friend, caught up in the excitement of sharing with a sympathetic ear the ridiculous nature of the situations we had found ourselves in when drinking, and would pass by the streets where we lived, engrossed in conversation. Sooner or later, one of us would look up and realize we had passed out of our neighborhood. So, we’d turn back around, heading downtown, often doing the same thing on the return trip, ending up far beyond where we needed to be and rebounding once again. Sometimes we’d even bump into another lost soul from the meeting and would start the process over again, circulating up and down the avenue like pinball ricochets.

About three years ago I worked in an office downtown near Wall Street, at the southernmost tip of Manhattan. During my lunch breaks I liked to walk along the river on the promenade around Battery Park, eating my sandwich and looking out over the Hudson River. I wasn’t particularly happy in this job and being outside along the river was usually the highlight of my day.

Around this time, I had a conversation with a friend of mine named Chris, who detected an unpleasant whine in my voice when I started talking about my job and immediately stopped me.

“You need to get in shape,” said Chris, holding his hands up as if to signal the end of the conversation. I wanted to protest, to explain, to continue whining about how horrible my job was, but I knew, at base, that he was right. I had to do something to change the negative pattern I had fallen into. For Chris, the answer was simple: get in shape. Easy for him to say, of course, as he trained regularly for marathons, went kayaking every weekend, and otherwise kept to a regular schedule of exercise. Not so easy for me, however.

I was an athlete in high-school and college – until I dropped out, at which point any kind of exercise went out the window in favor of sitting around smoking dope out of a bong and pounding back shots of tequila. Once I got sober, I made a few attempts at getting in shape, some more successful than others, though nothing ever stuck for too long.

One day, as I was eating lunch on the promenade, I realized that among all the things that I couldn’t or didn’t want to do – like jogging, or biking, or joining a gym – there was at least one thing that I could do, one thing that didn’t require any money, any equipment, or any particular commitment. That was to walk.

I’m not sure how it started, but one day after work I went over to the river, to think a little, to clear my head, and to get some fresh air. I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and I just started walking north, along the promenade, heading uptown. There is a bike path that runs along the river and without really thinking I just followed this path, one step at a time.

About nine miles later, I found myself at the doorstep of an AA meeting in my neighborhood, a small step meeting on Friday night. I had arrived on tired but smart feet.

For me, that started a once-a-week ritual, regardless of weather, trekking along the bike path from Battery Park to the Upper West Side. I felt like a mailman bound by the unofficial Postal creed: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

In clear weather, the bike path was filled with joggers and bikers, decked out in all the latest gear, whirring by me at breakneck speeds. In my work clothes and old sneakers that I wore every Friday, I plodded along the path, keeping to the side, putting one foot in front of the other.

It took me about two and a half hours to make it from downtown to the meeting on the Upper West Side and this little chunk of time each week allowed me to detox, so to speak, from the work week and to ruminate on things during a period of time in my life that was difficult for me to figure out.

I never did get in shape the way my friend Chris had in mind, but this regular walk provided a platform from which I was able to extend the amount of exercise I did each week and I began to feel less stressed about my work situation and better able to fulfill some of the creative endeavors I was engaged in at the time.

I walked through the spring and summer, into the fall, and finally, in December, had to abandon the routine due to the cold. Nevertheless, the walking did me good.

And it may have started a family trend. The next summer, my eldest daughter decided to walk 500 miles across northern Spain for her college thesis, following the ancient pilgrim trail El Camino de Santiago de Compostela, writing about her experience and ending her three-month journey in a place called Finisterre, a rock-bound peninsula on the western coast of Spain. Finisterre means “end of the world,” and she brought me back a shell picked up on the beach there.

I know as a parent and an alcoholic that there’s a good probability I may have passed on some difficult genetics to my kids. But, ultimately, I’m hoping that I’ve also passed on some positive things -- like my smart feet and the ability to keep walking.