A Morning Walk

The title is pretty familiar. This is something that takes us down the memory lane to the era of our elementary schooling days when essays were hard to write and tougher to memorize. Usually the essay would start like; my father wakes me up early for the Salah (Morning Prayers) and then he takes me to a nearby garden for a walk. The garden is full of flowers, fragrance, birds chirping, etc. etc. and the essay would emphasize that morning walk is extremely necessary for good health.

When I used to memorize this essay there wasn’t any garden in my neighborhood but those good and peaceful times wouldn’t resist us from visiting the parks and garden located at a fair distance during evening times. As I grew I started developing a habit of waking up early for Salah as well as going for a morning walk in a nearby garden. It’s more than thirty years now that I am carrying on this routine without change except for extremely cold and foggy winter mornings.

Being in Lahore is a great blessing because wherever and whichever part you live in the city it is always in the vicinity of parks and gardens. Most of the jogging tracks are built along the circumference of the parks and large gardens, usually in circular position. They range from a few hundred meters to 2-3 kilometers. This provides ample opportunity to build a habit of visiting them for jogging or brisk walking. Both morning and evening times bring you a scenic view of jogging tracks full of people; children, young boys & girls, middle aged as well as elders too. Many people prefer to walk in the evenings because of their early busy schedules or habitual of waking up late but I find the mornings more suitable due to tranquility, cool breeze, less crowd and little noise & pollution.

According to the convenience, preferences or whatever reason, the joggers and brisk walkers move in both directions on the jogging tracks i.e. clockwise and anti-clockwise. Interestingly the number of joggers in anti-clockwise direction is always more than the people in clockwise direction which continues to be a mystery, at least for me. Just wonder whether all the joggers and walkers have any connection with the facts that six (of eight) planets revolve around sun in anti-clockwise direction, earth rotates on its axis in anti-clockwise direction, blood circulates anti-clockwise in human body and millions of people in Makkah rotate anti-clockwise to perform Tawwaf during Umrah/Hajj!  

Coming back to brisk walking; from my youth till early middle age I used to walk in a direction where I could face maximum pretty faces of young girls. Hence, I would walk clockwise i.e. against the massive wave of joggers/walkers. As the spark started fading, so did I changed my position and started walking along with them.

Our current rented house is in the vicinity of a small ladies park which is used by all men and women for morning walk. Its’ circumference hardly measures 250-300 meters with a width of 1.5 meter. Hence making circles repeatedly on this track is like moving under centrifugal force or riding a bike in “the Well of Death”. However, by doing so, I came across a strange habit of mine; I can’t see people overtake me on a jogging track. And the worst of all, can’t withstand people walking swifter than me even in the opposite direction. Let me explain this crazy phenomenon: If I hear some noise of jogging shoes getting closer to me from behind I would start walking swifter, not to let the other walker overtake me. Similarly when I find someone walking faster than me in the opposite direction I mark the location visually where we made a crossing. In a complete round, there are two such marking points. And I make every effort in the next round to beat the opponent reaching these marks. While playing this game at the age of 50 plus I end up making my ankles and feet aching from fatigue and sleep restlessly the following afternoon and night. I wake up the next morning with the same vigor again.

My life-long rendezvous with the walking tracks has borne fruits. Alhamdulillah, I’m free of ageing maladies like insomnia, blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, etc., which usually prowl in this age bracket. Allah (SWT) has been very kind and merciful to keep me healthy. Perhaps I was destined to choose either of them, not both of them; wealth and health. When my greed tried to grab the wealth, an invisible force pushed me to capture wealth of health. So here it is.