Taking A Walk

by Dwayne Phillips

I didn’t know how many parts of the body could hurt from walking.

I wrote that statement in a blog post or a notebook early in the walk. It was true. I hurt all over. My shoulders hurt from walking. How does that happen? My hips hurt from walking. At least I could connect that pain to walking. There are 20-something bones in the human foot. They all ached at one time or another every day.

What I don’t know is how many surfaces of the foot touch the ground and the inside of a shoe. There are a lot of those surfaces. What that means is there are a lot of places on each foot that can develop a blister and then a callous. Why can’t the callous develop first and thereby prevent the blister? I guess that just isn’t the way it happens. Oh well.

Every day on the road something hurts more than everything else. That is the biggest pain. The biggest pain rarely lasts more than a day. There was the pain in my right shin that was the biggest pain for several days, but that was from a mysterious bite. Never mind that one. The biggest pain recedes after a day.

The biggest pain from yesterday is replaced by the biggest pain of today. One thing recedes; another thing comes forward to replace it. The next biggest pain always comes along.

There is some general principle here that you will find in all walks of life. I should have written “endeavors” instead of “all walks of life,” but this is a blog about walking, so… Anyways, this is some type of general principle. When the number one of anything goes away, it is replaced by the number two of anything. The number two becomes the new number one.

This general principle definitely applies to the pains found in walking.