An English Poet and the Law of Inertia

I thought I was on a roll.
Like in a Newton's First Law of Motion sort of way: an object in motion tends to stay in motion, an object at rest stays at rest.
I found a great downtown yoga class and signed up on the spot. I've been hiking every evening I can get out of the office before dark with Theresa and Ray, experienced backpackers who I met at the San Joaquin River the day after I found out I was hiking the John Muir Trail. We started chatting and now Theresa has taken me under her wing and is marching me up and down hills at Woodward Park while filling me in on the best bug repellents and trying to set me up with her single male friends.
My jiggly bits felt like they were at least gelling, if not yet Evangeline Lilly hard cut. I was even starting to get that thing I used to have in college when I was taking a lot of dance classes, where it feels good to be sore and you're always eager for the next work-out. My head was ok too. I was doing a pretty good job of tuning out various life punches and staying focused.
But then this weekend my little dash slowed to a dreary, dull, inching-a-long.
All day to day I have been in the doldrums. Listless and full of languor (without being langorous which sounds intriguing.) I have the blahs -- the whitebread, cut-rate version of the blues.
I tried to fight it. I really did. I even drove to Target and bought a Jack Johnson CD, with a song from the radio that I really like. I stopped at the grocery store and got some chocolate almond Haagen Dazs Bars. Music. Chocolate. Ice-cream. Nothing worked. Where is the crack cocaine habit when you really need it?
It may have been environmental (literally something in the air). Because Mac, my dog, was behaving oddly all day too. He was panting heavily and scratching and when I took him to the high school in the late afternoon, he loped in slow mo instead of running. We both sat down in the middle of the football field and just watched the clouds and rubbed our itchy eyes. (I used my hands, he rolled his face in the grass.) I never did run. Some choice, huh? I'm either being poisoned by some pollen count or whatnot, or I'm a moody creature in need of the sort of drugs that get Tom Cruise in a twit.
The interesting John Muir Trail twist to pondering my pathetic mood and it's possible causes is that from the historical perspective, western civilization first started heading to the wilderness in an effort to cheer themselves up.
I've been reading "The Art Of Travel" by Alain de Botton, a rather high-brow, oh-so-English philosophical writer. The book is about the inner-whys that compel people to travel. He talks about how it was in the mid eighteenth century, when the majority of the population shifted from living in countryside to living in towns, that people first started visiting the countryside in order to restore health and "harmony to their souls."
He writes at great length about William Wordsworth. Until now I was always a little flummoxed by how a guy who wrote about dancing daffodils ended up in my English lit book. But it turns out that at the time, Wordsworth proclamations of nature's pretties were a new school of thought. He proposed that nature was a corrective to the psychological damage of city life and it's social hierarchy and anxieties.
I don't exactly count Fresno as the big city, and even if I did, I enjoy an urban scene. And the John Muir Trail is taking the idea of the English countryside to the extreme.
But I am curious as to whether I will feel more "harmony of soul", as they put it, when I'm outdoors for over a week. I usually do feel better whenever I'm outside. Pretty much whatever my problem is, my first solution is to go for a walk somewhere pretty.
I call it a walk, Wordsworth saw it as seeking out the redemptive forces of nature:
...(Nature) can so inform
the mind that is within us, so impress
with quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
the dreary intercourse of daily life,
shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
our cheerful faith that all which we behold is full of blessings.

--Lines Written A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

I'll have to observe carefully and see if the JMT restores my "cheerful faith" .