1000 Miles: Day One

4802 steps. This is just shy of half the number of steps that my iPod set as my daily goal. Whoa. I will have to do some math to figure out the approximate distance. Not now. My plan for launching this grand experiment has coincided with a sudden case of sinusitis for me and my monkeys, so we are having some slow days.

Nonetheless, here are some things I've noticed already:

1. I have become conscious of the steps I am not taking. Every time I sit down at the computer or on the couch, my brain suddenly pokes me and says "No steps here!" and I feel like I should get up and walk somewhere.
2. My pedometer doesn't always count the "steps" I take when I'm crawling.
3. I crawl around a lot more than I ever realized.
4. It may take me years at this rate to walk a thousand miles.

It was just such a summer day, though! We needed to get out of the house. Starting with "baby steps" since no one was feeling particularly terrific, we did some chalk drawing in front of the house. I really wish my pedometer counted crawling steps because this involved a lot of crawling.

Do you recognize the painting?

We were emboldened by our artistic efforts, so after cleaning up hands and knees and filling bellies with lunch, we decided we all felt well enough to go to the park a few blocks from our house.

 These were my favorite steps of the day. Brilliant, surreal color, losing track of everything except the laughter of monkeys, the direction of the breeze, and keeping the kites in the sky.

 Then we needed a lot of underdogs.

Then a nap.

Until next time... keep stepping!

1000 Miles

We've all heard the adage "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". Heard it ad nauseum, probably. I was racing my monkeys around the block today and goofing with the pedometer on my iPod when I thought of that proverb. How many steps in a thousand miles? When we take the proverbial single step, do we know what's at the end of the thousand miles? Do we sometimes lose track of all of the steps in between and end up someplace else?

I'm going to attempt to answer some of these questions. I will be wearing my pedometer for the next 1000 miles of my life and journaling where all of those steps take me along the way as well as discovering where I wind up at the end of them all. Check back here for updates. Feel free to take your own journey and add your insights, too.

Oh, and in celebration of this new journey, click here for our theme song. Something else we've all heard ad nauseum, but catchy nonetheless.