What’s less known is why I do it. It’s not just to get in more reading time, although goodness knows it helps to get 50 minutes of round-trip reading in on the way to and from work, and it’s great to combine low-pressure exercise with reading. But I’m also an anxious person. Thoughts swirl. At my best, I’ve written poetry and solved intricate problems in my novels while I walk. But at my worst, leaving me alone with my thoughts is a recipe for trouble: I fidget, I bite my nails, and my thoughts are free to attach on things and intrusive thoughts, to begin racing, even as I enjoy my surroundings, try to employ mindfulness, try to take deep breaths.
Reading while walking takes all of that away. Reading while in lines, on the bus, or during commercials does the same thing: it banishes the possibility of my mind getting away from me. On my mental health quest, it’s crucial and helpful. And so seasonal depression hits hard. I already am prone to depression; I have anxiety; I am rejuvenated by sun and thunderstorms and feel low when I can’t go outdoors. Many of us feel lower in energy and in joy when the sun begins to set before we even leave work in the winter. Add onto that the parts of winter that come after my reading time. It’s too cold to have my hands out to turn pages; it’s too hard to turn them in gloves, and anyway, in Chicago, even gloves aren’t enough; and then the wind and damp are bad for the books. And before the cold even hits that hard, add the progression of short days, and now it’s also too dark to read on the way home, leaving me to bundle in and walk home alone with my thoughts. I’m trying to get back into podcasts, to see if it will keep my mind from racing away as it so often does. And perhaps it won’t be as bad this year: I’ve made a lot of progress against my anxiety and insomnia over the course of 2019. But still, I’m dreading the dark evenings that come with late fall, that come to take my reading and walking away, leaving me with less reading time overall as well as more time to walk in the cold with my anxiety. I don’t mean this piece to just be defeatist. Here’s hoping that this year, I can refocus: that the long walks home will become once again wellsprings of creativity instead of haunted by my worries. But even if I can’t, I’m calling on all of us to start now: let’s prepare, let’s get our mugs of tea and warm baths ready, let’s start carving out more reading time to balance any that’s lost to the cold days, let’s invest in warm light lamps and Vitamin D supplements and talk options and strategies with our therapists. Let’s dive into not letting dark nights defeat us.
