Tag: thoughts

The Wandering Hermit: Assessing Myself on a Thursday Morning

   20 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: Assessing Myself on a Thursday Morning

I feel inspired this morning.  I didn’t get enough sleep, but I still woke up feeling great and ready to do all the things!  I’ve been focused heavily on poetry this month and it has me feeling very hyped for new projects, and I even got some writing in the other day.  I can always write.  But I have been busy with other things and so my writing has been pushed to the back until I’ve settled somewhere.  That is a trap I’ve fallen for before.  There is no settling.  Life is always chaotic in one way or another, but it is a choice to deny myself expression.  So, I resumed the writing I should never have paused.

My pace for the entire 3.39 mile walk this morning was under 20 minutes per mile!  That was incredible.  Once again, I did at times feel like I was power walking like a suburban mom on a Wednesday morning, but most of the walk felt fine.  And breathing never became an issue, but a brief exception when a car drove by and I was dealing with some dust for a few minutes.  Otherwise, my lungs seem the best they ever have.  My VO2 Max number has sort of plateaued, but I just need to keep doing what I am doing; hopefully it moves along soon.

I’m starting to get used to the slower rate of my recent weight loss.  I had been discouraged that it was slowing down, but when I started I knew that would happen.  It’s actually a good sign to not be dropping 3 to 5 pounds per week.  Weight loss at that rate was a sign that I was far too overweight.  I seem to be at 1 to 2 pounds per week, with an occasional outlier of 4 or 5.  If there’s something I could switch up to increase that, I’m just not all that interested in exploring it.  I like how I’m eating, I like my exercise routine, I’m drinking a lot of water, and most nights I’m sleeping well.  I don’t really mind this pace because everything is feeling so great.

[Walk #95]

The Wandering Hermit: 2×7 or 5x?—It All Depends

   19 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: 2×7 or 5x?—It All Depends

I woke up at 4:50am, but I didn’t get up for my walk right away since it looked like it would be rainy and I thought I’d let it pass first.  I should have just gotten up and done the thing.  I prefer walking as early as possible and it never did much more than drip here and there, which was still happening when I gave up and decided to get started.

Brent (my older brother) finally got an Apple Watch, and of course on the first day he used it he got in a 5 mile walk.  I’m not sure if he is being competitive.  He knows I do 2 miles every morning, but if he is then he forgot that I am not competitive at all.  My m.o. has always been to compete enough for you to feel like your win was justified, but I’m not interested in beating you at whatever it is.  If my walks make Brent walk a little more than me to show me up, then I stay that is great.  In that scenario, I am doing what I can to help.

I still haven’t figured out an afternoon workout, but I could just be doing more walking in the afternoon.  It’s too warm for that at the moment unless I go ahead and join a gym.  I don’t want to lose myself though; I fear a little that a gym environment would so take me out of the world as to make me start not knowing who I even am.  Of course, nobody said I can’t still do my morning walks outside.  And nobody said a gym is even required.  When I belonged to one before, it was motivating because I didn’t want to waste the money each month, so I’d go just enough to make it feel like I wasn’t doing that—3 or 4 times a week.  I think I feel the same now.  It could also be a goal for getting down to 250 pounds—that’s only 17 pounds away.  That would also give me some time to decide if I can really afford it.

[Walk #94]

The Wandering Hermit: The Scissortails Exist for Themselves

   18 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: The Scissortails Exist for Themselves

The wind blew like an hyper child this morning.  There were gusts that caught me by surprise almost enough to cause me to lose my footing.  I love the wind, but something about the warm air moving that quickly unnerves me a little bit.  I think it’s possibly just the knowledge of the extreme heat to come, or maybe there is something inherently mischievous about warm winds, a sentience I can perceive.  I prefer a bit of cool air rushing at me.

During my walk I could hear the scissortails chirping in the field on the south side of the road, and my instinct was to say to myself Oh! the scissortails are serenading me on my walk. But then I remembered Alfred Russel Wallace in Papua New Guinea.  He had seen the many species commonly known as birds of paradise and remarked:

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course year by year of being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness—to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty.  Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy.  It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy.  This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man.  Many of them have no relation to him.  The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyment, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected.” (from The Malay Archipelago, 1869)

I thought of that and how these Texas birds of paradise have no use of me, no urge to sing for me.  In fact, on many mornings they might wish I would not disturb their courtships, and they would be correct.  They are a decent enough example of a bird that is not necessarily harmed to a great degree by the presence of humans, but neither are they particularly helped.  I’ve adopted the image of a scissortail as part of my own business because it is a part of the place where I live, a native part of the ecosystem—evolved to thrive here, and I have a lot of respect for that.  So, it’s lovely to hear them chirp to one another at dawn, but I should know my place and stay in it.

My pace continues to improve.  During the second mile of this morning’s walk, I was just under 20 minutes per mile, which is my quickest yet.  I was stomping down the street for sure, but I never felt like I was overdoing it or racing.  I just felt confident in my stride and walked as quickly as I was comfortable.  I went to Brush Creek Rd & back, an the only issue with that route is how flat it is, the flattest of my paths.  It’s hard to get my heart rate up consistently on the one, but I didn’t have that issue this morning.  I thought I had; the strong winds kept my shirt dry, so I was surprised when I finished to see that my heart rate was about the same as yesterday’s when I was just drenched in sweat.  That quick pace probably helped.  

Protein shakes.  What do I do with a protein shake.  So, Justin doesn’t love vegetables as much as I do, so an easy way to address that has been to add protein shakes to his daily meal plans.  He seems to enjoy them.  But I’ve been trying to have them as well (because I won’t ask him to do anything in a meal plan that I won’t do) and I cannot seem to get them to taste quite right… or maybe this is what they always taste like and I just can’t handle it.  I enjoy premade things like Soylent or similar products, but mixing protein powder just doesn’t do it for me.  I want it to do more for me though, so I’m going to keep trying to find ways to make it work.

[Walk #93]

The Wandering Hermit: Cardio Thoughts

   17 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: Cardio Thoughts

I woke up with a lot of gusto.  My lethargy yesterday had been the result of allergies after stirring up a lot of dust on Saturday, so I was glad that my body had calmed down about that and I would be able to get on with it today.  Fortunately, there isn’t really all that much dust stirring to do; we did that job already.  Most of the rest consists of things that have sat in closets or cabinets, and it will all be relatively dust-free.

My gusto created a wind at my back and while still on the slow side, my pace was very good for me.  I was watching a video over the weekend by John Glaude (ObesetoBeast) in which he was reacting to a video by Anna O’Brien (Glitterandlazers) on her quest to run a marathon.  In her video she was disappointed to find that while she had been training, she was technically walking or power walking, but only is short bursts even breaking into a jog.  She was not running at any point.  John made an excellent point, and one that I needed to hear at the moment.  It is not necessary to run.  It is just fine to walk.  I’m paraphrasing.  What I appreciate about this, and what he briefly explains, is that running is not a superior form of walking.  They are two different types of exercise.  I did actually know this, but I have found myself recently falling into a trap of thinking that if I were better at this, it would be a run.  And that thinking isn’t helpful.

I am interested in learning to run, but not as a replacement for my walks.  I’ve grown fond of my walks and in fact I look forward to them so much that I want to extend them.  I’ve already started to make plans for how life might look in a future where I can walk maybe to a park or in a park, and stop midway to do my journaling.  I love that idea.  Where I currently live, there aren’t places to stop.  It’s for the same reason that my walks tend to be limited to 2-3 miles; that’s the distance from the corner where I live to the next street and back.  I’m not quite to the point where I don’t need a bit of a rest after that distance, but as I am back home by that point I just get on with my day.  If there was a spot to sit just at Yost Rd, I might try going another mile, doubling my total for the day.  In town, that will be more of an option, and one I wouldn’t mind taking.

Prompted by my brother’s concern, I’ve been a little concerned about my heart rate at night.  I don’t know if I would have thought about it much if he hadn’t been talking about it.  I routinely drop to about 38 or 39 BPM, usually just as I’m starting to wake up.  Whether it is a function of my body waking up or I am waking up in response, I cannot say.  But heart rate is something I’ve been working on in general.  I don’t have the luxury of being able to see a doctor at the moment, so I have to treat myself as carefully as I can.  One thing I’ve been trying, and which seems to be working okay, is to do a bit of cardio just before going to bed.  I don’t think it needs to be as strenuous as my morning walks, but a few minutes of jogging in place or a few minutes on the exercise bike.  I just want to get my heart rate up to about 120 BPM for a little while.  I do pretty well with my recovery rate, so it returns to normal pretty well, but on the nights where I have done that—so far—I have not dipped below the 40s.  Of course, that could all be a coincidence and maybe I’m grasping at straws.  But I’ll keep experimenting.  In those final moments before bed, I’m almost always watching YouTube, and I can easily just get up and do some exercise while I watch my video.  

The other metric I’ve been really interested in increasing is VO2 Max, which steadily increased from 27 April to 11 June, but seems to have stalled out.  This morning it had decreased which was pretty frustrating, but I have a lot of allergy issues and I’m sure that is part of the problem.  I’ve become complacent with my allergies, rarely feeling the need to take anything at all because it has felt so much better without the 150 pounds I recently lost.  But it is possible I’m not allowing myself the full potential of my lungs by denying myself the relief of allergy medications.  I do hate being dependent on a medication, but sometimes things just are what they are.

[Walk #92]

The Wandering Hermit: Lightning Bugs & Guilt

   16 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: Lightning Bugs & Guilt

I have a lot of guilt related to Dad.  When I first came to Oklahoma from Alaska, I was in decent enough shape.  I had spent a few years in a retail job where I sat down most of the day, but I still needed to be able to be active.  The first few years, I was able to do a lot of things, from planting a garden that failed to mowing the lawn every week to grocery shopping.  But my health was negatively affected by a cut I got that became infected and I let it be the excuse that let me stop being active and gain a lot of weight.  And when I was just starting to recover from the worst of it, Mom passed and that sent me into a long depression.  And it was doing the same for Dad, only 300 ft away in his own house, but he might as well have been halfway around the world.  It’s true: everyone grieves alone.  When Dad’s health started to decline, and he was diagnosed with cancer, I was a very sick person.  I had no business helping to take care of someone else when I could barely take care of myself.  Dad wanted me around more, but it was hard to walk and hard to get down the steps.  It took a lot out of me to go up to his house that I limited those trips, which understandably bothered him.  I had not yet identified myself as the problem.  My nephew had, and I know he had a lot of issues regarding me.  I can’t blame him; he was correct.  I just wasn’t ready to hear him.  I could have made the changes I needed to make to help out more—help out better.  Would that have meant Dad would still be here?  Probably not.  He died of issues stemming from his cancer, and I doubt I could have lost enough weight to make his cancer go away.  But I could have been there more, and I do feel a lot of guilt about that.

I wanted so much to get my walk in this morning before 6:00am.  It was an arbitrary goal, but I did make it.  And that was including my ridiculous distraction trying to get a good video of lightning bugs.  I’m convinced they know when they are being recorded; they would all be lighting up in chorus, but as soon as I touched the red button there was darkness, except for one slowly blinking—a crumb for me.  That took me out of my walk enthusiasm initially, but I had only just started, so I was able to pick it back up an finished at 5:59am.

My legs are noticeably smaller than they used to be, but plagued by issues.  I think they have a tendency to respond negatively to hormonal changes.  Some days, they’ll be just covered in rashes or in pimples or they’ll be dried out.  I never know what kind of day it’ll be with my legs, and I’m really interested in not thinking about them all the time.  I don’t know if that will ever be my reality, but I would love that.

I’ve been making my housemate Justin’s meal plans, and it’s going fairly well.  He’s not 100% in it, as he still will add this or that to the day, which is honestly fine, but he’s definitely the type to give himself permission for a big thing since he was allowed a small thing.  It’s a different thing doing his meal planning because he thinks of himself as being on a diet which will eventually end.  I’m trying my hardest to make it so sustainable for him that he won’t want to stop, but he does love fast food french fries and if I don’t work them into a meal plan he will just end up eating them anyway.  For next week, I will try to incorporate that.  What I am trying to stress to him is that he can eat whatever he wants, but he needs to track that.  If he wants to mindlessly eat, he needs to eat a different way.  It’s perfectly fine to do that as well, but fast food is not on that plan.

Dad didn’t understand nutrition, and probably intentionally.  I never saw him as old, but he seemed to start thinking of himself that way.  He was never good at eating healthy foods honestly, but in the last few years he seemed to think it no longer mattered what he ate.  He was happy to just eat all the junk food and did.  But that also isn’t exactly true.  While Dad’s actions indicated a sort of indifference to his own life, as well as his frequent statement “I’m ready to go see your mama,” during his first meeting with the oncologist at the VA, things we very different.  It was August 2022, and he had just received the cancer diagnosis.  When we went into the meeting, I fully expected him to not want to fight, but he told the doctor he wanted to live and wanted to do whatever necessary to treat it.  Lifestyle changes are hard, and I was hard on him during those last few months.  But I also wanted him to live.  In the end, he couldn’t outrun cancer like he had hoped.  In the end, it didn’t matter if he had gorged himself on étouffée and apple pies.  But I can’t help but wonder how things might have been different if I had lost this weight ten years ago.  Would my parents have tried out my way of eating?  Would they have been healthier as a result, or was it just too late to turn back the clock?  There are so many things we can never know.

[Walk #91]

The Wandering Hermit: The Day After a Lumpy Friday

   15 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: The Day After a Lumpy Friday

Yesterday started out strong, but I ended up not feeling my best most of the day.  I had chosen to not have any caffeine, and I think it just caused me to be a lump.  I barely did much at all after my morning walk.  I do need to remember that it is okay to have days that are intentionally not productive.  It helps everything settle.  I have plenty of days when nothing seems to get done, but those are typically days when I’m using the mental energy to try and stay busy, but this or that thing keeps getting in my way.

It was another warm morning—foreboding.  I was hoping to move some stuff today, but I’m worried about the heat.   I can’t stay too worried about the heat; we have to get everything out!  I’ll do my best to make the biggest impact I can today, even if that means not taking things to storage.  Brent is going to be here Wednesday?  I’m not exactly sure, but next week anyway and I’d like to have him feel better about the process.  I have thoughts on that, but they aren’t worth exploring.

I tried listening to a podcast this morning, this time The Stephanie Miller Show, something I have listened to at home for years… although not in a while just because I have so needed a break from the firehose of politics.  I enjoy the show, and it had its moments, but I didn’t like it as much for walking.  The most successful bits were story driven, and I think the podcast I choose to listen to in the morning should just be a story.  I think those who recommended audiobooks are on to something.  I haven’t yet tried them, but I will do that soon.  Tomorrow morning I’ll probably be back to music though.

[Walk #90]

The Wandering Hermit: Warm Walks & Good Apps

   14 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: Warm Walks & Good Apps

This morning was beautiful, but a little too warm for as early as it was when I set out.  It was a warning to keep the A/C running and stay inside today.  But it was an invigorating walk, and it ended with running into Justin who had decided on his own to go out and walk.  He was doing the area between the mailbox and Fairgrounds Rd, back and forth.  I’m not sure how long his walk was, but I was so proud to see him out there doing it without my prodding or involvement.  Good job, Justin! 

Why didn’t I do this sooner?  I’ve been craving a system to do my journaling and to keep track of everything in a centralized way.  For a long time, I used Notes to do everything.  It’s still full of writing and links and notes to myself.  But Notes has limitations and as I started adding things like a daily health log and a journaling habit, it became increasingly clear that I needed something that could handle that information a little better.  I worry about using third party apps and blogging websites.  They are often better, but they also have a habit of shutting down and leaving the users with no place to go.  It’s annoying to have to rebuild a following.  That’s why I started my own websites years ago, and I still think they are the best place for my thoughts, even when the readership is low.  But they aren’t the solution for my daily needs.  I’ve been using Day One for two weeks now, and so far it is nearly perfect for most of what I do.  There are some significant things it cannot handle, but I also understand why it has those limitations.  Primarily, formatting is extremely basic on Day One, lacking even the ability to center text.  For 99.9% of applications, I imagine that is fine.  For me, a writer who likes to play around with justifications and spaces, it is a hinderance.  But I still have my trusty TextEdit to use, and pairing the two is fine for now.  I don’t love that the work I already have will have to be formatted incorrectly or not added to the compiled journal, but it is what it is.  No app is perfect; this one is just better than the others I’ve tried.

[Walk #89]

The Wandering Hermit: The House Next Door

   13 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: The House Next Door

I’m trying to shift my thinking.  A few weeks ago I was happy in my ignorance about my future.  I’ve been there before; sometimes it’s nice to just know that you’re about to let the wind take you and to not be all that concerned with the outcome.  But as soon as I was presented with a plan, I started to settle on it and when it looked like that would no longer be possible, I felt like something had been taken from me, forgetting how recently I had been content to ride the wind.  So, let’s reset and regroup.  I’m not interested in the kinds of stress I was allowing in.  I need to remember myself.

I do not know where I will end up once we sell the house and move on.  And at this point, I’m not sure I want to know.  This morning I was thinking about how much I’ll miss living out here in some ways.  It’s not my dream, and it is very inconvenient to me, but it is nice and peaceful.  We are on the corner of Fairgrounds Rd & Burris Rd.  The house across Fairgrounds is nostalgic to me.  My grandpa used to take us on drives on the gravel roads of Payne County on this side of Stillwater.  We might end up driving through Glencoe or Pawnee or Morrison before returning, but that house was one of the landmarks I remember from then; it’s one of the few things that has been the same for all these years.  Most of the houses out here are much newer.  It was at first a little surreal living across the street from that house.  It’s almost like having an old imaginary friend move in down the street.  It existed in my mind, but I had no reason to drive out here before my parents moved here, so I didn’t know if my memory was real or if it was all a creation of my mind.  It’s not a particularly interesting house.  There’s nothing fantastical or noteworthy about it, but for many years it was just a part of those moments spent with Papa, and more recently it’s where the people with the horses that like to escape live.  And soon I’ll leave this place and I won’t see it all the time.  And I wonder if I’ll still remember it fondly or if it has lost its meaning.

I think walking has been good for me.  Sure, it’s been great for my physical health, but I think it has helped me mentally.  It is often over-emphasized that walking is good for mental health, but it’s not wrong.  It seems to allow my brain to sort things out.  I wonder if there is something unique about the action of walking or is it the traversing of a distance.  I’m going to be joining a gym soon and doing my walking there much of the time; I wonder if I will see the same benefits in mental health or if I need to be out in the world.  I used to do an hour of walking daily at a gym in Anchorage, Alaska.  I wasn’t in the same place mentally when I started, so I don’t know that I noticed any shifts.  After spending years depressed, anything was going to feel monumental, but the walking has helped quite a bit.

I’m not sure what to do to get started with running, but I am interested if it is possible.  I tried it for a minute during my walk, but felt like it was too jarring when I hit the ground.  Maybe I’m just not used to it, but it was unpleasant.  It felt doable in general otherwise.  It didn’t hurt or cause my to not be able to breathe, which had been my primary concern.  I’ll look into it.  It seems weird that I couldn’t just start running.  I feel unequipped.  But I also am slightly amazed that I’m even interested in trying it out.  I keep saying it, but it is true: I cannot believe that one year ago I could barely walk at all and now I want to walk everywhere.  

[Walk #88]

The Wandering Hermit: Hold onto the Bird, but Don’t Pick Up the Sky

   12 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: Hold onto the Bird, but Don’t Pick Up the Sky

Discipline.  I keep repeating that to myself, holding onto it like a bird struggling to fly away from my grip.  I don’t know if I’ve always craved discipline, or if my newly rekindle relationship with myself is fueling some changes that make me want to structure my life a little more.  It’s like I want to add supports to prop everything up just in case it starts to slip again.  

I set an alarm for the first time in years.  I don’t actually need an alarm to wake me in the morning, but sometimes I sleep until almost 6:00am, but then I feel disappointed that I didn’t start walking at 5:15, so I just set an alarm.  I have been thinking about structuring my morning more as a schedule I have to follow rather than a loose set of activities I want to accomplish with no real set times to get those things done.

My schedule, roughly, before today

4:30am–8:00am: wake up (normally between 5:30 & 6:30)

morning:  outdoor walk

after walk:  shower, weigh-in, coffee, breakfast, writing

some time during the day:  meditation probably, food logging maybe, more writing, etc… lots and lots of etc and misc.

Honestly that has been working for me, especially as I got more and more into taking care of my body.  I wasn’t been so regimented about the whole process, but I am increasingly wanting a great deal more discipline and structure.  I’ll try to work on outlining something in the next day or two.

The dawn felt delicate today, like I needed to handle the sky gently so as not to damage it.  Yesterday felt robust and sturdy in retrospect.  Was it the color of the light breaking over the horizon or the clouds or if it was all an illusion based on my own state of mind?  It’s so difficult to know for sure where the feeling came from, but I didn’t dare pick up the sky at all.

[Walk #87]

The Wandering Hermit: Boundaries

   11 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: Boundaries

mostly personal, not too terribly health focused

I need to learn how to set boundaries and demand that those boundaries are respected.  And it isn’t as though I don’t try.

I’ve been staring at the screen waiting for permission to feel the way I feel.  I’m not sure why…

I’m frustrated.  Yesterday was mentally exhausting, but maybe ultimately revealing.  I’m neither the person everyone wants me to be, nor am I interested in becoming that person.  Some folks have decided they know how I need to be, how I need to live, how I need to dress, who I need to spend my time with.  I am 44 years old.  I don’t understand where they found the audacity to act this way towards me.  And absolutely every time I express my concerns or try and set some sort of boundary, I’m shut down.  My feelings aren’t valid, or what I’ve said is entirely dismissed.  It’s so frustrating to feel such a huge lack of respect.

I’m trying to clear out my parents’ house.  I spent six months begging for help before I decided that I would need to do most everything myself.  But I couldn’t physically.  It was part of why I needed to lose weight, and after I started losing I started packing.  The house was full, the shed–a 20’x60’ enormous space was completely packed with stuff.  And I went through it, and I threw things out for months.  I went through every bit of the lives of several people, deciding what was important and what to get rid of.  It was an emotionally taxing event, and often genuinely a struggle.  In a lot of ways it was the nostalgia that was difficult, but mostly it was the solitary nature of it all.  It didn’t feel warm in the way reminiscing should.  It felt lonely because I was doing it alone.  I’ve been making a lot of decisions alone & neither of my brothers seems like they are interested in really dealing with some of this stuff.  One is in a hurry to sell everything and move on, which I understand.  We do need to do that.  I just think he does that at the expense of both my feelings and at the expense of my ability to keep some of my own things, which he has suggested I just get rid of.  And I’m not exactly sure why I should have to.  The other hasn’t been ready to deal with much of anything for a while now.  He does have some health issues, but he doesn’t really make much of an effort, seemingly waiting for someone to show up and do all of his living for him.  He is as dismissive, but also has a sense of entitlement about other people’s time, trying to employ guilt to get everyone to wait on him.  Guilt trips are a form of emotional manipulation, and are a sign of disfunction.  DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE THEM.

I’m sure I will be fine in the end.  I’m sure everything will work out.  I’m looking forward to some new places to do my daily walks.  I’m looking forward to being near enough to a gym that I can go there for some consistency when it’s too hot or too cold outside.  I’m looking forward to creating my own life and not being held back by people who never put their own lives on hold for me.  I don’t owe them that either, and I really need to stop believing that I do.

[Walk #86]