Every single day I walk, run, or cycle. It doesn’t matter whether it’s rainy, sunny, windy, snowy or other. I do this out of habit. I know of quite a few routes that I can walk, run or cycle so there are variants. Some are long, some are short. If it’s going to rain I may choose a shorter route.
Leysins Group Hike Today I could have driven to Leysin to do a group hike.
Twice in the last two weekends I have done linear rather than circular walks. By linear I don’t mean that I walked from A to B. I mean that I started walking along a loop but when I saw that the routes I wanted to walk were either crowded by couples or people with dugs I will either turn around, or walk across a field to a parallel path that is less crowded.
Two days ago I went for a longer walk than usual. I walked along roads rather than along the narrow agricultural roads I normally use. I wanted to avoid crowds and dog walkers. The thing about solitude is that it’s enjoyable when you are not reminded that you are alone.
Today I will also have to try to avoid people. Some might be really happy for good weather, but not me.
I knew that it would rain heavy yesterday (at the time when you read this) so I considered running so that I would spend less time in the weather. The issue, at this time of year, is that if you run you need to do so before the sun sets but you also want to wear lighter clothes, for running to be easier.
Ready for Rain For these reasons I went for a walk instead.
The pandemic is still alive and well and the hope that we might have had that the pandemic would end has been scuppered because governments refuse to work towards COVID-Zero, and they refuse to be cautious. It is disheartening to see with which complacency governments are sleeping back into exactly the same mistake as last summer. Last summer they allowed the numbers to climb, and ignored the risk of another wave, and this summer they are making the same mistake.
Self-Sacrifice and Pandemics are intimate friends. In order for a pandemic to end we must learn to do without things that we need. We go without meeting friends for months, we go without hugs or handshakes for months. We go without restaurants, bars, cafés or cinemas for months. We go without needing the internal combustion for days at a time.
Human Contact I mention all of these things looking at the past 76 days.
It’s the sixtieth day of solitude for some of us and if we look at Twitter we see that people in other countries are suffering. One person spoke of the dark dog whilst another expressed distress. A third expresses another emotion. Around the world we see people suffering and trying to cope in their own unique ways.
I went for my daily walk but I wasn’t fully motivated so it was a relatively short circuit.
Today I went on a photo walk. Since walking far is now out of the question if you want to be consistently socially distanced it makes sense to go out with a different purpose. When the purpose of the walk is to take photos you can afford to walk up a hill, or between two people to avoid being too close.
A cat naps in a courtyard in the middle of the day during the 2020 Pandemic in Arnex-Sur-Nyon.
I was writing a Facebook post when I thought of the term Pandemic Solitude and I love it so much that I wanted to use it as a title for today’s blog post. For most people during the pandemic the order is, stay with the people you live with but avoid being close to others.
When you live with no one this means that you should avoid being close to anyone.
Today is Day Four of Orca in Switzerland and I saw that the Canton in which I live has the most active cases of COVID19 so my motivation both to go to shops and to go for walks has taken a hit. At the same time I don’t know whether it’s COVID 19 that is having this effect or the fact that I walked a theoretical 197.2 kilometres since the start of this month for the March Activity challenge.