Walking As Medicine: Craig Mod’s 300-Miles On Foot, Japan's Philosophy Of Enough, & The Profound Power Of Undistracted Presence

I started doing these huge walks where I'd walk for 30, 40 days, 20, 30, 40k a day with this big pack on. No social media, no news, basically nothing that teleports you out of the moment. Getting rid of all that ratchets up your attention, cranks up the focus. I'm just collecting little archetypes of possibility. This is what life can be like.

This is what life can be like. For me, what I get out of these walks, I want to talk to as many people. I want to bear witness to as much life being lived as possible. It's bearing witness to possibilities of how to live and how to live well. Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast.

So right now, as I'm recording this introduction, this missive. It's Friday, May 2nd, which is six days before, and uh, by the time you're hearing this, a few weeks after, going under the knife for a pretty extensive procedure called spine surgery, where they're gonna go in through my abdomen to basically scrape out the disc between my L5 and S1 vertebra so they can insert this cage basically, which creates space for the nerves that are currently impinged and contains this marrow material that ends up growing bone that over time, like six months or more, will fuse these two vertebrae together. Then they're going to flip me over and they're going to go into my back to insert screws and rods to basically hold the whole thing together.

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