Walks with Penny

Penny’s PR is a 40-minute mile.

Walks with Penny aren’t for exercise.

Well, not for the physical kind, anyway.

Walks with Penny are contemplative and meandering, full of starts and stops. She appreciates every blade of grass, every leaf, every fallen twig.

She pauses to sniff deeply. Often, she doubles back to re-sniff something she smelled a few moments ago, and we rarely (ever?) traverse more than 10 feet before we need to pause again.

Occasionally, she stops mid-walk. She halts on a square of sidewalk or scrap of trail and just… pauses. She looks around or stares off into the distance. Her nose twitches a bit, but she’s otherwise still. After she’s satisfied, she starts up again.

Walks with Penny require patience.

Sometimes I don’t have it in me. Either I don’t have the literal time or the ability to draw from my often-empty well of extra patience.

Sometimes, Penny has to walk with Stola because of time, convenience, weather, whatever. And, on those walks, Penny can pick up the pace. She will never be interested in a walk the same way that Stola is–move fast, cover as much ground as possible, pull when necessary, but move move move move move–because it’s simply not her personality.

She moves slowly. She lives slowly. She operates on Penny time, a glacial pace that can be challenging to honor in the reality of our busy life.

This morning, I took Penny to a nearby nature preserve to walk the trails. Stola is currently under rest and restriction from an injury (that’s another post for another time) so I knew I’d be able to pour all my time and attention into Penny. It was clear only a few feet from our car that she felt the spaciousness of this walk. Even getting to the trail head took longer than usual as she thoughtfully examined the gravel and weeds poking through.

Together, we walked 1.04 miles in 41 minutes and 17 seconds. We walked so slowly that my watch kept asking me, “End walk?”

It’s certainly not physical activity, but it’s a special kind of fitness–my mind clears, I can take deeper breaths, I hear the birds in the trees and the rustle of the leaves.

So often I find myself frustrated with Penny’s pace. On work days or days when the girls need to be a bunch of places at once, on days when my phone is ringing and my texts are piling up, on days when it’s raining or snowing, the stress gets to me, and the walks feel like a slog.

“Come ON, Penny,” I think as she stops to sniff yet another unseen-to-me but-interesting-to-her blade of grass. Real life can get out of hand. It’s busy. The day to day can be so hard. Crushing, some days.

But, on days like today, when we have plenty of time, when I don’t have to rush through our walk to get to a meeting or the girls to an appointment, when I’m not distracted or anxious, when it’s just me and PenPen…

When everything falls perfectly into place, there is nothing in the world more peaceful than walks with Penny.

What are walks with YOUR dog like? Slow and contemplative, like Penny? Or fast-and-furious, like Stola? Or something in between?