It's Good for You

One of the small pleasures I enjoy every day is a lunchtime walk through the woods in the rolling hills that surround the place where I work. This routine started about a year-and-a-half ago, as a means of helping me get some exercise during my mostly sedentary day. A program at work encourages employees to get-up and walk, get the blood pumping so to speak - and I took advantage of it. I even bought a pedometer, so I can count how many steps I take every day - setting goals for myself and seeing if I can meet (or even sometimes exceed) them.


There are also some other advantages to being outside on a daily basis though.
You get to see nature up-close and sometimes, if you are lucky, you also catch some glimpses of the wildlife that makes its home in the woods.



The pictures above were taken a week apart, mid-to-late October.
The groundhog was eyeballing me warily and skittered off into the woods as soon as I took the picture, while the particularly tame pair of deer (you can only see the tail end of the second), nonchalantly walked deeper into the forest when they noticed me stopping to take their picture.

What I also find enjoyable is seeing the forest change with the seasons. When I took the picture at the very top of this post in mid-October, the leaves of the Burning Bushes had just changed from their regular deep green color to the bright red you see - those leaves are now gone, the bushes standing bare.

All the pictures in this post show the colors of Fall, which will soon give way to the drab browns and even the whites of winter.
When I took the picture at left on October 30, my footsteps crunching through a thick layer of leaves with every step, the yellows and reds of the leaves were starting to turn to brown, signifying that the present act of nature's amazing color show was being completed.

That is OK by me, I have enjoyed the Fall color show and I am looking forward to the upcoming Winter show.

I have also come to the end of this post with a simple conclusion. Walking in the woods is good for me - for my body and my mind. It grants me a brief period of exertion and a chance to clear my head. It is a feast for my eyes (which I try to capture with my camera) and a chance to marshal and re-prioritize all the various thoughts, tasks and ideas running through my head.
It gives me a chance to escape into nature, while still being able to return to my office to resume my work in a timely manner - a blessing I am not too sure many of my colleagues grasp.