The meaning of life

I’m working at home this week and next. I like walking to work, so I go for a walk each morning before I get started. We’re not talking a quick spin around the block, either. No. GC and I recently downloaded the app Walkmeter for our iPhones. We can now track every step.

Of course we’ve always tracked our steps, using pedometers. But sometimes I would get bored with the tedium of steps. Ten thousand steps, twenty thousand steps, ho hum. Walkmeter gives us a whole new world of things to track. We’ve got time, pace, distance, speed, calories, splits, and laps! We’ve got maps and routes and little flags for furthest and fastest! We’ve even got a website (The Daily Mile) with competitions between walkers around the world!

So, as you can see, a little stroll around the block just doesn’t cut it anymore.

My morning walks are 10 kilometers. That’s like 6-point-something miles. It takes me an hour and 40 minutes.

I walk 4 or 5km at lunchtime, too, and sometimes I go out in the evenings for a bit. Altogether, I’m walking about 17 km a day. So is GC, and so is Rosie, although we don’t usually all walk together.

Mornings, I walk the Experimental Farm recreational pathway. It goes out behind Caldwell Avenue and then through a forest and some fields to Woodroffe. Sometimes I listen to short story podcasts, but the last couple of days I turned it all off to listen to the birds: ravens, cardinals, chickadees, red-winged blackbirds and other birds whose names I don’t know. Plus there are big V’s of Canada Geese honking across the sky as they continue their journey home. It’s pretty spectacular.

And of course the weather has been record-smashingly perfect all week.

So everything was idyllic out there on my walks, except for one thing: the carnage on the path. Seriously, there was some kind of mass migration of snails and earthworms the last couple of days. Miles and miles of snails and earthworms, trying to cross the path. It was awful seeing their crushed shells and squished segments all over the path.

Even worse, on some level, was seeing the ones who were still alive and healthy. The ones diligently humping their way slowly, slowly, across the path, amongst the bikes and runners and walkers and skaters. The ones who had so far escaped but were still in imminent mortal danger.

I tried to be philosophical about it. I told myself the meaning of their lives is collective. It’s about survival of the species. If enough of them make it across the path, that’s all that matters. I tried to believe this, but who am I to say that their individual lives don’t matter to them just as much as mine does to me?

Eventually I couldn’t bear it anymore. I stopped walking and started picking them up and moving them to the other side. I couldn’t save them all – I had my pace to consider, after all – but there are at least a dozen snails out there who are still alive because of me, and who have gone on to do meaningful things with their lives.