Journeys and Star Gazing

I don’t walk to train. I don’t walk for records, medals, or to impress anyone. I walk because it steadies me. It carries my thoughts, my breath, my prayers. It opens the body and quiets the mind. It’s the simplest thing I can do every day to remember who I am.

In September 2021, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. The numbers were clear, the warnings louder. I was offered medication—but something in me wanted to try another path first. I chose to walk. To eat differently. To live more deliberately.

Since then, I’ve walked almost every day—briskly, with intention, usually around 5 kilometres. I changed what I ate. I simplified. I gave my body a rhythm it could rely on. Over time, without medication, my blood glucose stabilised. I lost 18 kilograms, dropping from 88kg to 70kg, and I’ve now been in constant remission for over three years.

Alongside walking, I began doing simple resistance exercises — bodyweight movements like push-ups, squats, step-ups, planks, and curls with light dumbbells. I spread them throughout the day. No gym, no machines, no memberships. Just consistent effort in my own time and space. It’s nothing fancy — but it’s steady, and it works.

Recently, I discovered something else: my resting heart rate is 47 beats per minute — a number typically found in elite endurance athletes. For comparison, the average resting heart rate for a man in his 70s is around 70–75 bpm. Mine has averaged between 47 and 50 over the past year.

I’m 73. I’ve never run a marathon. I smoked in my youth. I’ve lived an ordinary, frugal, imperfect life. And yet, my heart beats like someone who trained for gold.

I don’t share this to boast. I share it because I find it mysterious. Beautiful. A quiet reward I never aimed for.

Most afternoons, I walk along the riverbank near where I live. Over the years, I’ve taken hundreds of photos — of the sky, the water, the shifting moods of light, and the quiet animals I encounter along the way: water dragons, ibises, ducks, and others. I share some of these images on my Bluesky account, and many are gathered here:

Photos from a River Bank & a Flood Plain:
https://dodona777.com/photos-from-a-river-bank-a-flood-plain/

It’s become a kind of visual journal of stillness in motion.

I walk because walking helps me listen. I walk with purpose, with rhythm, sometimes with prayer. I walk west in the afternoons, as the sun leans into shadow. There is a place along the path where I stop to breathe and pray. Then I return east—to the place of beginning, where the sun rises. It’s not exercise. It’s something older than that.

I believe the body remembers truth. And perhaps, over time, it reshapes itself around that truth. My heart doesn’t beat slower because I’m extraordinary. It beats slower because I made space for stillness every day, for years.

That’s why I walk the way I do.

This reflection came to me not while walking, but while lying still, listening—on a day I chose to rest.