Finding Magic in the Mundane: How Walking Saved My Mental Health during Quarantine
All the houses in Cerritos, CA look the same. They’re all earth-toned suburban structures with perfectly manicured lawns and driveways lined with rose bushes. Simple, but predictable, much like everything else in the city: there’s a huge auto square, a shopping center guarded by palm trees and a couple parks complete with sandpits and swingsets and neighbors that are always ready for small talk.
Even just driving through Cerritos, I felt stifled by its monotonous, repetitive nature, which is why I always hated spending breaks here at my grandparents’ place. Nonetheless, my dad decided to have my brother and I come back from school to wait out this quarantine with my grandparents in Cerritos.
While I understand the need to keep family together during a crisis, this move was hard on me as I went from one uncertainty-filled environment to another. Instead of waking up in my dorm room to conflicting emails from USC and being surrounded by students unsure of whether to fly home or not, I walked into a house that had the news on all day, showing case numbers and death tolls that changed every couple of hours. The constant voices of President Trump, reporters, COVID-19 victims and quarantined citizens were overwhelming, and I needed to figure out a way to seperate myself from all the noise and relax.
At the start of this pandemic, we were just told to wash our hands frequently and try to avoid large crowds. As time went on, the list of things we were able to safely do got shorter and shorter and eventually, California went on lockdown. This meant I really couldn’t do my usual coping methods like go out with friends, escape to an obscure museum, take some sort of art class on a whim, or participate in any group activity, for that matter.
The only things that the CDC and health experts recommended for maintaining physical and mental health during social distancing were working out at home or going on walks. In fact, every article I read almost exclusively highlighted the benefits of taking time to go for a walk or run during this time of stress.
I didn’t have the motivation or energy to start running or actually working out, but walking was a healthy activity that I could manage to do, and it’d be a safe way to get out of the house. I soon decided to start making time for thirty minute walks around the neighborhood everyday, so I could start creating a sense of normalcy for myself.
Walking around the neighborhood provides me with the comfort I need, the comfort I crave. There are no voices drowning out my own thoughts, there’s just the distant, but constant sound of birds chirping and a gentle whirring of a lawnmower here and there. There are no screens full of numbers my eyes need to squint to take in. Instead, there’s the sun shining down onto my face, playfully reflecting off my chrome studded boots. I don’t think about anything, I just exist. I walk and I breathe and I exist.
There’s almost something magical about the mundaneness of my walks. They force me to remain in the present moment and breathe, and I find myself looking forward to Cerritos’ threads of consistency. During my daily walks, I start and end at the same point and always count on seeing the same rows and rows of tan houses with their perfect lawns and rose bushes. However, by the end of each of these walks, I feel renewed.
Quarantimes 