Chapter 7

I didn’t eat or smoke for almost three days because of the withdrawal. Staff kept saying, “Ya gotta eat, ya gotta eat,” as if I don’t know that I have to eat.

Once I started eating again, my old friend nicotine came knocking. Hard.

As part of the program, the state provided a weekly stipend of $35—enough for basic hygiene, thrift-store clothing, or cigarettes. Most of the patients smoked, which is no surprise. Poor people and cigarettes go together like rats and alleys. There’s something about being broke that makes lighting small fires near your face appealing.

As a lifelong smoker, my first instinct was to trade my entire stipend for a fresh pack of cigarettes asap. But then I had another thought. I’d already spent twenty years and thousands of dollars slowly killing myself. Maybe I should take a break? The real question wasn’t why I craved cigarettes—it was how the hell I was even still alive?

The facility had a long hallway that looped from the back to the front, around the interior of the property in the shape of a big fat zero. Fitting. In the center of the loop was a small courtyard that offered natural light, like a cruel little reminder that the outside world still existed.

So, I started walking the zero.

I didn’t have some big, reflective, brain galaxy moment where I thought, Hey, maybe I should go for a walk! No, my body just took over, like when your phone rings and you instinctively stand up to take the call and start pacing around, or how smokers instinctively reach for a cigarette after a meal.

And I just kept walking.

I walked before bed. I walked first thing in the morning. I walked with a cup of tea. I walked while reading books. I walked in circles. I walked alone. And yeah, I’m sure I looked like a crazy person.

But I had a lot of problems. So, I walked with my problems.

And I’m pretty sure that walking with my problems kept me from walking out of the program.

WALKING IS A MIRACLE

People act like our big brains were the holy grail of evolution. But the real game-changer was standing up and walking on two legs. Most anthropologists agree that bipedalism—our ability to walk upright—was a defining moment in human evolution. Without it, we wouldn’t have free hands to stab animals, start wars, or scroll through our phones while ignoring each other in public.

Walking is one of the Six Steps to Humanness. And isn’t it funny that we use the word steps to describe the Six Steps to Humanness?

Walking is baked into the way we think. We dare to walk a mile in someone’s shoes. We wish people good luck by telling them to break a leg. We even have religious stories about the son of God walking on water.

Even before we can walk, we want to walk. Hold a baby up, and you’ll see it trying to climb up your chest like a tiny, drunk mountaineer. Some researchers even suggest that fetuses practice “walking” in the womb, kicking around in preparation for the big debut. And when a baby finally does take its first steps, everyone loses their minds like they just witnessed a miracle.

And maybe it is a miracle.

It’s no coincidence that some of the greatest minds in history were obsessive walkers. Thoreau wandered the woods for hours just to keep himself sane. Charles Darwin had a personal walking path called the Sand Walk, where he worked out his theories. Nietzsche hiked through the Swiss Alps for up to eight hours a day, claiming that “all great thoughts come from moving legs.” Kierkegaard, who I think died while on a walk, once wrote, “I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”

Even in modern times, some of the most innovative minds swear by it. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, has said that most of his best essays started as ideas he had on a walk. Hell, he even decided to start Y Combinator while walking.

WHY I WALK

Some of the staff at the facility found my constant pacing amusing. One of the counselors called me Walking Man—a term of endearment, I’m sure. Another joked that they should start paying me for “security services.” A third asked me, “No, but really… why do you walk so much?”

Which, honestly, is a dumb question.

In a world where people waste their energy on fake busyness—endless meetings, doom-scrolling, performing productivity—it’s apparently weird to do something that doesn’t have an obvious purpose. But tell me—what’s the saner reaction to being locked in a facility for 90 days, fresh off alcohol, meth, and nicotine? Pacing the perimeter or sitting still, pretending like everything’s fine?

The reason walking helps me is precisely because it isn’t important.

People stress me out with their “important” things—deadlines, obligations, or people expecting things from me. But walking? Walking doesn’t need a justification. It doesn’t demand anything. It doesn’t pretend to be productive. It just is. And that’s what makes it so valuable.

Figuring that out was one of the biggest discoveries of my recovery.

I’m not going to bore you with a bunch of scientific studies on how walking reduces stress, lowers cortisol, and boosts serotonin. Maybe for someone else, the magic is in doing the dishes or taking a long shower. But for me? Walking is it.

And when I think back to those first few laps around the facility, trying to outrun my nicotine cravings and whatever the hell else I’d done to myself, my only regret is that I didn’t write more of my thoughts down at the time.

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