Monday, December 11, 2023: My Favorite Things # 9

Walks!

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels. Currently in the last weeks of the year I am listing some of my favorite things!

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Daily Diary, Day 1196:

I know you won’t be surprised that I decided to include my daily walks as one of my favorite things. They are what get me out to experience weather and clouds first hand, and on these walks I discover and delight in various holiday decorations, especially during the fall and winter.

However, I think that the most important aspect of my walks is that they have been a life-saver in terms of my mental and physical well-being since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. For over a decade before covid, doing water aerobics three times a week at our local rec center had been my go-to form of exercise. Initially these classes were canceled because of Covid, and when they opened, they shifted the time to later in the day, which doesn’t work for me, and they have become crowded as well (turns out lots of people prefer them at 10 or 11 rather than at 8 in the morning, which was when the class had been for decades.

In short, I did needed to find a different form of exercise. Now, nearly four years, later, I have decided that walking needs to remain my major form of exercise because it provides me more consistent opportunities to exercise (water aerobics classes were often cancelled,) it is more efficient in terms of time spent, and it gives me so many extra benefits.

So, what are those benefits?

First of all, I discovered how much I enjoyed listening to audiobooks during these walks. I have struggled for years over the fact that I was doing much less recreational reading than I was used to doing. As you all know from these posts, my days are busy, and the evenings I spend watching tv and films with my husband. In fact, it seemed the only time I just sat and read a whole book came when I got sick. But since my new pattern of staying out of enclosed public spaces since Covid, I haven’t had a single cold!

Once I started walking every day, and I found the discounts of older mysteries showing up on Chirp, I discovered that I quite like listening to books as I walk. In the past couple of years I have listened to over well over fifty audiobooks, which has not only made my walking more enjoyable, but also has been a simple pleasure I might not have without these walks.

The second, not unrelated benefit of these walks was my introduction to podcasts. I still get most of my non-fiction related reading through print magazines, and online editions of newspapers and substack newsletter, but when I ran across the Shedunnit podcast about the Golden Age of Detective fiction I discovered that this was very much like listening to fiction and I have gotten enormous enjoyment this past year listening to podcast, the History of Rock Music in 500 songs.

Finally, these walks have given me a new appreciation of the benefits of staying in the present, which comes from paying attention to what I see around me. I saw this as described as mindfulness walking. I have never been good at meditation, but a third of the time in my walks, I turn off the book or podcast I am listening to, put on some music, and become totally aware of what I am seeing around me. I have found this works best if I pick a theme (like looking interesting flowers, clouds, sunsets), or occasionally, Holiday decorations).

Most of my life has been spent looking in the internal world of imagination that goes with reading and writing. These walks have brought me a new appreciation for nature and the beauty in the visual world outside my mind.

Here are just a few of my favorite photos from the past six months.

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