The Importance of Walking!
I’ve had an early birthday present!
The way every great blog post should start. But seriously, my wife always thinks ahead, and she’s bought me a pair of walking boots. She let me ‘have a say’ in which ones I preferred, and actually, on this occasion, I chose well and she liked the ones that I said I liked. She gave me a choice of two so I had a 50-50 chance of winning. But genuinely, they arrived today, and I really like them.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a pair of walking boots before. I’ve had ‘walking shoes’ in the loosest sense of the term, but I bought them cheaply and they were never really fit for purpose, so I’m really pleased with them.
I’ve just tried them on as I had to take some stuff out to the garage, and it made me start thinking about walking. And I’ve come straight away to my laptop to write them down because I feel like I’ve got a few things that are worth saying.
Walking
Walking is good. My wife always talks about how much she loves going for a walk. How it helps her to feel refreshed and gives her some headspace. I agree with her. I walked round to a friend’s house last Friday evening. It’s only a ten minute walk, but I had some things going through my head that I felt I needed to think through, but didn’t really want to talk to anyone about. It was really windy, and whilst it sounds really corny, I felt like the wind kind of ‘blew away’ some of the negative ideas in my head and allowed me to refocus on the positive ones. I felt really good as a result of that walk and thoroughly enjoyed my evening of double helpings of a Chinese takeaway, singing to songs of the past and watching the never-ending performance put on by our four kids between us.
Something I often see on social media these days - and it’s 100% true - is that new ideas come to you when you least expect it, including when you go for a walk. I guess your mind starts to settle and relax and thoughts become more free flowing. It’s great to take a break from things by going for a walk, and if you’re in the middle of trying to solve a problem or a challenge that you face, you might just find a way to fix it!
What does walking mean to me?
All of this made me start thinking about how walking has helped me in my life. When I’ve been upset, I’ve gone for a walk. When I’ve needed a break sometimes, I’ve gone for a walk. When my wife and I have wanted to spend some time together, you guessed it, we’ve gone for a walk.
But then I started thinking more about walking. About times in my life when I’ve felt more relaxed. I’ve not got stressed out about things that were going on. I’ve not got bogged down with things that can have that negative effect on you, and I realised that the times when those things have least effected me, are the times where I have done the most walking.
Now it may sound silly, but that time was when I was at university. And I know most will say well, you didn’t have a family, you didn’t have as many bills, you didn’t have to go to lectures if you didn’t want to, and all of those things. And you’d be right, but I didn’t have those things at school either and I allowed myself to get stressed about exam results and other things. So I thought about it some more, and I realised, that when I was at uni, I used to walk 20-30 minutes into uni every day and back again. Some days I would do it twice. Some days I’d do it twice, and then I’d walk to the other side of Nottingham (it’s not a particularly big place) for a band practice - an attempt to try and be cool. Some days we’d walk into the centre on a night out, and then walk back home again. I’d never really thought about it until getting these walking boots today, but I walked a heck of a lot in that time. And when I look back at that time, generally speaking, it is the most relaxed I have felt about things in my life – and I really do think walking has an awful lot to do with it!
Walking and schools
There is a point to all of this talk about walking. Aside from the obvious thoughts on walking giving you headspace, or blowing the cobwebs away I think we can apply this idea of walking to school improvement. Schools are intense places to work, particularly at the moment. It’s fast paced, things can move at a million miles an hour, and lots of people want lots of different things to happen all at the same time.
What if we slowed down a little?
We are great at identifying all of the areas of development and action planning. But what if instead of focussing on everything that needs to be done and trying to sprint our way through it, we were a little better at prioritising what was important first and focussed just on that?
Firstly, we’d probably get that aspect done a lot quicker and be able to move on to the next priority. Secondly, it’s a much more achievable target. Thirdly, it’s much simpler to monitor, evaluate and reflect on. And finally, I think people wouldn’t feel so burned out all the time and would actually do a better job because they feel a lot better.
I know it’s really easy for me to sit here and say this, with all of the external and internal pressures schools and leaders face. And I know that in some circumstances, we have to work on more than one thing at a time - please try not to take me too literally here. But I think we need to try to walk a little more, in all senses of the word.
If we try to get everything done all at once, it probably won’t work. I’ve seen it happen. If we work in a really focussed way on specific objectives or the smaller aspects, we an build a bigger picture more quickly - I’ve seen that happen too.
Just a thought.
If you want to talk more about developing your curriculum, you can book a catch-up with me through the link below. I’m always looking to find out about others’ ideas about developing different areas of the primary curriculum.