About a month after I retired in 2019, I began taking a five-mile walk around Contoocook nearly every morning. Since then, I have logged more than 11,000 miles. My original intent was to prevent a sedentary retirement from taking a toll on my aging body, and while I am certain that 13,000 steps every morning has enhanced my physical health, I suspect that my walks have done as much, if not more, for my mental and emotional health.
I walk the same one-mile loop every day, so finding my way home doesn’t involve that much mental exertion. From time to time, I will bump into fellow pedestrians and chat them up, which requires a little bit of brain power. But still, putting one foot in front of the other for a couple of hours doesn’t make much of a demand on my gray matter.
However, a couple of years ago, I invented a car-counting game to occupy my mind while I walk. The details are not important, but it involves keeping track of the number of cars of certain brands that I happen to see on specific segments of my walk. The rules are a bit complicated, but not quite baroque.
I’ll admit that there may be a touch of OCD lurking behind my game — there’s one crosswalk where I count the stripes every day to make sure that there are nine of them — but my car-counting game has several other dimensions.
For one, I’d like to think that keeping track of the number of cars I’ve counted helps keep my old-man brain just a bit sharper.
Even bigger than that is the dopamine factor. My game is full of little targets all leading up to an overall goal. Each of those targets and goals is a chance to win or lose, and every victory provides a dopamine hit. I’ve calibrated the game so that I get victories on most laps, and hit my big target once a week or so. I’m no psychologist, but I figure that there’s some value in setting up a mental exercise that gives me some dopamine every day.
So I try to keep my mind sharp and my dopamine levels high by counting cars. I keep my heart full by walking Annabelle.
Annie lives with her family in a house along my route. After I had been walking for about a year, a family asked me to walk their dog, Molly, which I was happy to do. For about a year, as I walked Molly past Annie’s house, Annie barked at us from her porch. Then one day when Annie was out in her yard with her owner, we finally met face to face, and we hit it off. Shortly after that, I stated walking Annie every day. It was only much later that Annie’s owner and I realized that Annie had not been barking to ward me off; she was inviting me over and asking me to be her friend. Today, Annie’s owner introduces me to people as Annie’s best friend.
Indeed, Annie is one of my best friends, and the 45 minutes we spend together every morning are among he best moments of my day.
It begins with the greeting. Annie knows my morning schedule, and she’s often standing by the door when I come by — no mean feat for a 16-year-old dog. If she’s napping somewhere else in the house, she usually trots out to see me when she hears me at the door. She’s not a big face-licker, but she always lets me know she’s glad to see me, spinning her tail like the rear rotor on a helicopter.
But the real highlights come when Annie and I hit the street. I talk to her all the way around our loop. Sometimes I update her on my car counting, but mostly I just tell her how much I admire and love her. I’ll even break into song, finding a tune and making something up as I go along. When Annie’s in her groove, she’s trotting along at my side wagging her tail. Many is the time I’ve told Annie that if I had a tail, I’d be wagging it too.
I simply cannot express how good it makes me feel to to walk around Contoocook with Annie, seeking out every way I can to let her know how much I love her. It truly lifts my soul, and I hope that everyone reading this has the chance to feel what I feel when I walk Annie.
Annie’s family frequently thanks me for walking her, but every time they do, it just reminds me of the debt of gratitude I owe them for sharing Annie with me. Being with Annie makes me the me that I want to be.