The COVID scare seems to have changed the landscape of exercise. Now there are so many walkers of all ages that it’s hard to avoid them. It seems to have become a national hobby, even though walking has been deeply unfashionable in America ever since the invention of the motor car. People will normally go to great lengths to avoid walking even a few steps, as you can observe in any supermarket parking lot as drivers compete for the parking spaces closest to the entrance.
Walking is in fact quite easy. I learned to do it at the age of about fourteen months, after what seemed like a long time crawling around on the floor, and I’ve been walking ever since. I liked it from the start. It is more dignified than crawling, and faster, and allows me to see more things. Some medical authorities have even suggested that walking may be good for our physical health, although we should probably reserve judgement on that.
There is more reason to believe that walking is good for our mental health, although most of the evidence comes from the past when people used their feet much more than we do now. This may help to explain the astonishing creative and intellectual brilliance of certain characters in history. How did they achieve so much? It certainly wasn’t because they had good health care, or even good health. What their biographies tell is that many of them walked a lot, not only from necessity but also from choice. Here are just a few of the heroic walkers of the past.
The peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece who walked from city to city all over Asia minor, the poets of the Romantic Age like Coleridge, Wordsworth and Blake, the philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau who wrote a book about walking, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens who was reputed to walk twenty miles a day, Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, the composers Brahms, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Dvorak – the list could go on almost indefinitely. They were all great walkers.
The mechanical business of walking and the freedom of being outdoors, seem to expand the mind. There’s no competition, no speed, no hurry, no rules, no disturbance. What could be more conducive to creative thinking? And there’s the secret, I’m sure, of our astonishingly creative ancestors. They walked a lot, and therefore thought a lot. The new walkers of the COVID era tend to some in groups, often family groups or tight little bunches of teenage girls (rarely boys, for some reason) all walking and talking and looking at their phones at the same time.
The problem about walking in a group is that it cancels out one of the main benefits. Walking time is thinking time. That’s why it’s important to walk alone sometimes, because the whole experience is about being with yourself and paying attention to the world around you. You can’t talk and walk and think at the same time, and of course a phone cancels out any thought whatsoever, as it is designed to do.
Inspiration is not guaranteed. You can take a long peaceful ramble in the country, never meet another person, and come back with your head as empty as before. It happens to me all the time. But then, at least, I had a nice quiet walk.
Copyright: David Bouchier
