Walking in Cold Air
"He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul."
— Psalm 23:2–3
There is something a walk gives you that nothing else does.
Not exercise, though that is part of it. Not fresh air, though you come back with your lungs feeling scrubbed and your cheeks carrying the cold long after you've stepped inside.
It is something harder to name than either of those things.
A kind of restoration.
I walk by the Sound.
That kind of beauty asks something of you.
It asks you to be present. To stop thinking about what comes next and simply stand at the edge of something vast and let it be vast.
There is a particular peace that arrives in those moments—
not the peace of nothing happening,
but the peace of something so much larger than yourself that your own worries briefly lose their grip.
Nothing has changed.
And still, something has.
I come back from every walk with more than I left with.
More clarity. More steadiness.
More of whatever it is that gets worn down by staying inside too long.
The cold does not take from you — it gives.
It sharpens something. It returns something.
The air is cold.
The water is still.
That is enough