Walking with Kindness

          My psychiatrist told me to take mindfulness walks: “Walk anywhere at any pace for at least fifteen minutes. Leave your phone, headphones, and distractions at home and just go enjoy nature. I think you’ll find it to be helpful.”

          The first time I laced up my shoes and begrudgingly dragged myself out the front door, I was at my parents’ house in Michigan. I didn’t want to do these walks because they sounded both boring and useless—when had I ever been able to ignore my thoughts/stresses/constant commentary and just be? Full of spite and monumental irritation, I closed the door behind me, hoping my mental crises were soon to be naught—a cure as old as time in the form of “fresh air.”

          The soft sounds of damp bark shifted beneath my feet as I took the path from the porch to the private drive that I’d walked, biked, and driven over and over throughout my youth. I headed west toward the beach, and I could almost feel my heart rate quicken as all the unspoken words, thoughts, and ideas buzzed in my ears—just out of reach of my consciousness. How on earth did the man expect this to help me? Everything is ten times louder out here and ohmigod did I just walk into a web? I was assaulted with sensations: one side of my body warming with the morning sun, the other shaded and chilled; am I going to get an uneven burn from this? Should I have put sunscreen on? What time even is it…am I allowed to look at my watch? Was I supposed to leave that at home too or can I track this as exercise? The light darted in and out of tree branches and leaves hit me in the face every few steps; every sound was exaggerated in the quiet.

          Providing both medication and lifestyle changes for the past year or so that I had been seeing him, a few appointments after he suggested the active mindfulness, my doctor had discussed with me the importance of healthy eating and the ways in which nutrition can play a huge role in optimizing our brains’ functions. I nodded, probably raised my eyebrows in amplified intrigue, and jotted down some notes as he spoke—the signal of our TeleHealth session fuzzing in and out. I wasn’t shocked, necessarily, as he described the chemistry of neurons and synapses and their more accurate firing when the body takes in raw, natural proteins, but I did quietly wonder what he would say when I told him I didn’t eat meat.

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          In 2017, I ate my last meal derived from the flesh of an animal. Aside from a teenage claim that I’d no longer eat pork as a way to prove my serosity of adopting a teacup pig someday—“I mean, I would never eat a dog…”—I’d never thought much of the food I ate. My dad and brother ate hardly anything green and/or healthy due to extreme texture sensitivities and Mom was strictly health-conscious, buying organic anytime she could. My body “worked,” functioning as I needed it to, and I was grateful for the food placed on the table every night. It wasn’t until I matured and left my small, rural hometown that I found myself even mildly intrigued by the vastness of gastronomy.

          One of my closest friends in college was vegetarian—she abruptly stopped eating meat in middle school after watching a documentary. I was intrigued, fascinated by her ability and desire to be a silent activist, standing up for animals and with nature; I had never known the significant environmental impact of the meat industry. Though my transition was not immediate, my friend’s dedication to ethics and kindness and health in a way I hadn’t considered, inspired me to be more purposeful in my own choices, eventually deciding to join her in the plant-based community.

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          When he was done explaining the benefits of meats like turkey and chicken and various species of fish, I grimaced slightly and told him that I was vegan; I hadn’t consumed meat for over three years and cut out dairy, honey, milk, eggs and all other animal products in January of 2020. His response was expected: “It’s not altogether impossible to gain the nutrients and vitamins you’re missing from meat and other well procured animal products, but it is definitely more challenging and often it’s more expensive.” My nose wrinkled and I asked about natural supplements and other earth-derived proteins—I would not eat meat again even if it would help my mental health; the mere thought made me nauseous. He gave me the name of a company that specialized in “micronutrients,” optimized with minerals and vitamins that aide in ideal functioning of neurotransmitters. After our appointment, I googled the name and sunk my shoulders at the cost of one bottle; while it wasn’t astronomical, it felt like a luxury I couldn’t justify with my minimal earnings.

          It was much later when I pondered the paradox he unintentionally presented: appreciate, recognize, live with the beauty of the natural world around us, but also make sure to eat enough “natural” protein. Enjoy the vastness of earth untouched by humanity, but pay no mind to the environmental decline at the hands of our kind. When I initially began my vegan quest, I was solely concerned with animal rights and welfare. I forced myself to face the harsh reality of animal farming, to truly equate the living farm animals I squealed about out my car window with the chunk of bleeding meat on my plate. For me, it was an easy transition; the simple matter of kind awareness that the food placed in front of me had to come from somewhere.

          First and foremost, I am vegan for the voiceless; those who are corralled and beaten and bred in spaces half their adult sizes. I am vegan for my physical and emotional health: I know that the products I buy and the food I consume did not come at the cost of a life. But recently, the more I learn of the environmental impacts of meat and dairy farming, I am also vegan in a futile attempt—hopefully naïve at best—to save what’s left of our over-farmed, unaware, largely ignorant planet.

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          My default relationship with the natural world is more or less flawed. For years, I took all its resources—the beach I grew up on, the changing colors of the leaves every fall, the meat that I ate—for granted. I remember a time when “fun” meant racing through my backyard with my brother, running to our neighbors through the trees to play in the sand or dart among the pines. Yet, I also remember the bliss of a time when the food in front of me was an endless supply of faceless, nameless meat; no one bothered to explain or even wonder what it was and where it came from and if/when it would stop being enough to feed all the people of the world. I never thought twice about the uniformity of the shiny pre-packaged cutlets in the fluorescent light of the produce aisles, nor did I take any time to stop and truly observe and enjoy the world around me. When my doctor proposed I practice “active mindfulness” in the form of reconnecting with nature, I felt unbalanced and out of place—as if I had wasted all my awareness and gratitude as a sweetly innocent child.

          If much of life is navigating and maintaining equilibrium, the way we understand and relate to nature and the physical world should be no different. My first mindfulness walk was nearly 6 months after I transitioned to a fully vegan diet and while I do not believe that my relatively new lifestyle was the reason for my stimuli overload, I can’t help but wonder at the possibility of a correlation. As a culture, as a society, how can we sing the praises of oneness with nature while continuing to mass produce its resources for our own consumption? Perhaps subtle awareness—and kind, yet informative activism—is the key to unlocking the balance between civilization and the globe in which we did not create, but ultimately will destroy.

Written for Master of Arts in Professional Creative Nonfiction Writing at the University of Denver; October ’21