Just Another Lunchtime Walk

Any Given Morning

It’s Tuesday, and Ben is the first person to the office. He likes it this way. When he started working for Tech Solutions, he began arriving an hour early as a way to avoid traffic, but found, as the years went on, that getting to the office before everyone else was the best way to get his work done. He would have one hour to himself, to do his work crunching numbers, before his day would regularly be hijacked by his coworkers. He started to call this time in the office alone his “Power Hour,” a solid hour all alone, able to work.

It’s not that he didn’t like his coworkers popping in, it’s just that they loved to take up his time, usually with idle chit-chat that wasn’t work related.

It’s always been that way for Ben, people talking to him. Ever since he could remember, even as a kid, he found himself as the person others would talk to. Adults, kids, friends, random strangers, he couldn’t really understand why people would tell him things, but maybe it was because he rarely gave answers back. At times he would actively listen, but most of the time he found himself able to drift off in his own head while people were telling him about their life. 

Ben had this ability to seem completely interested in what others were saying, yet not hear them. He would get home from work and his wife, Amy, would ask him about his day. Ben would mention that his co-worker, Bill, came into his office and talked to him for what seemed like hours.

What did he talk about?”, Amy would ask.

Ben replied, “I have no idea.”

Tuesday would be like many of those days, but at least he had his “Power Hour.”

Halfway through his morning, he looked out his office window and could see it was turning into a wonderful, summer day. There wasn’t the haze in the air that was permeated the past few weeks that made 85 degrees feel like 95, and the blue sky had a few puffy clouds drifting by.

It was going to be the perfect day for a walk at lunch which made Ben happy.  Earlier in the morning he stepped on the scale, still stuck at 220 pounds, dreaming of the day he would finally get to his goal weight of 170. He had no great plan to get there and was always frustrated because, for years, he had always hovered around 220. In his head he knew the walks during lunch helped, well, at least helped keep things steady, but even he would tell himself, “Weight loss begins in the refrigerator.” An extra beer on the weekends, too much love for ice cream, and even though he tried diets like eating lentil pasta and salads while cutting back on sugar, the changes never stuck. He also hated salads because he couldn’t eat them in the car on the way to his walk.

Ben would drive Amy crazy, “I need a sandwich or a wrap for lunch, not a salad. I need to eat it in the car while I’m driving to the park so I have more time for my walk.”

“How long does it take to eat a salad, and why don’t you just eat it at your desk while you work?” she would ask Ben.

“I don’t like eating at my desk,” Ben would sigh, “Someone always interrupts me. I like my lunchtime to be my lunchtime.”

As the morning went on, Ben was looking forward to his walk more than most days as, so far, the morning was filled with epic “therapy sessions.” That’s what he would call the interruptions by his coworkers. It was the kind of morning he was glad he arrived earlier than everyone else because, as he was looking back on the morning, the only work he had gotten done was in his power hour.

Precisely at 11AM Ben turned off his music, went to get his lunch out of the staff refrigerator, came back to his office to get his water bottle, turned off his office light, and made his way to Spring Grove Park.

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