Since I got home I’ve been taking walks.  I started with painfully slow 6 minute walks 3 times a day.  Now I’m taking at least one 20 minute walk at a brisk pace.  In my recent and past life my exercise has either been indoors or happens after a drive to a starting destination but now I start from my house.

As I was walking tonight I realized that, in the past few days, I’ve seen parts of my neighborhood and the surrounding few miles that I haven’t seen since I was a kid, trekking around.  Or-to be more precise, now even when I’m on roads I drive every day of my life I’m actually seeing them.  There are houses I used to play at and ones we all used to avoid.  Every neighborhood has a witch; ours was no exception.  I forgot some of the houses had pools that are not easily visible from the street.  There are dips in the road I loved hitting on my bmx, sometimes even standing on the top bar.  There’s the house the cute girl lived in, where we all hoped and prayed the blinds might be forgotten someday, even though they never were.

And there are so many varied smells that come with walking around.  Smells you don’t even catch on a bike.  Each house, and yard, and area where maybe more water gathers than others-they all have their own scent.  I caught myself stopping on more than one occasion to take in some wonderful breeze that caught my nose.

This, to me, is almost revelatory.

I’ve always prided myself on being a very sensual person.  Not in the sexy sense, mind you, but very sense-oriented.  I would often get distracted by a sight or smell, and still do here and there but these walks are making me realize how much of the world I seem to have just forgotten somehow.  In all the hustle and bustle and structure of my day to day life I forgot what the simple pleasure of getting out and experiencing the area around me.

And now I’ve rediscovered it.  And I love it.  Every sweaty, wheezy, counting the timer and heartrate on my fitbit second of it is a treasure.