by Maggie Palu, American Women in the Aquitaine
Walking is an ideal activity during the pandemic. Walking is about more than just moving one foot in front of the other, and always has been. Walking can soothe and comfort. Walking can sharpen the mind and be inspirational. While working on A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens walked for miles through the back streets of London, developing the plot in his mind as the city slumbered. Novelist Louisa May Alcott regularly took long walks through the countryside near her home in Concord, Massachusetts. Beethoven was inspired by walks in the Wienerwald outside Vienna. Nietzsche pondered the questions of life while wandering on what is now known as the Nietzsche Trail in the Swiss Alps, and instructed followers to “remain seated as little as possible.” He wrote that “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau often walked 20 km per day (probably before the incident with the Great Dane), and confessed that his body had to be exercised to make his judgment active. He stated that “a feeble body weakens the mind,” and as he walked, he wrote down some of his thoughts on playing cards that he always carried with him.
Walking is sometimes used by people who wish to change the world. Protesters demanding an end to injustice, racial or otherwise, are following in the footsteps of defiant walkers throughout history such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1930, Gandhi and 80 of his followers set off from his ashram in Ahmedabad, walking south toward the Arabian Sea. By the time they reached the coast 24 days later, the number of followers had grown to several thousand.
The act of walking is democratic, although access to safe walking isn’t always guaranteed, and not every potential walker has equal access to walkable paths. Freedom is the essence of walking. Those of us who do have safe access should feel fortunate, and should take advantage of the opportunity to experience that freedom and, as writer Robert Louis Stevenson (who lent his name to a trail in the French Cevennes) suggested, to “follow this way or that, as the freak takes you.”
The pandemic has robbed us of a lot of activities, at least temporarily. We feel trapped. There is so much we can’t do at the moment, but WE CAN WALK, and recent studies confirm Rousseau’s theory. It has been shown that one’s mind is at its most creative at three miles per hour, the speed of a moderate stroll. A Stanford University study by Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz (“Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking”) found that creative thinking was “consistently and significantly” higher for a group of walkers than for a group of sitters. And not a lot of walking was required to boost creativity; from 5 to 16 minutes sufficed. Several studies have found that people who walk regularly are healthier and live longer than those who don’t, and one does not need to walk fast or far in order to enjoy the benefits. A recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine concluded that the 10,000-step figure is an arbitrary number. It’s the steps themselves that “count,” and not necessarily the number. Older adults in particular gain health benefits by taking only a few thousand steps each day, even at a leisurely pace.
Walking is also a proven way to lose weight (e.g., perhaps some of those pounds/kilos gained when we couldn’t go out of our houses during confinement), not only by burning calories, but also by reducing appetite. A study by Adrian H. Taylor and Anita J. Oliver at the University of Exeter found that a 15-minute walk “reduced chocolate urges” and stress eating. Walking has also been shown to ease joint pain, boost immunity, and reduce the risk of developing breast cancer.
As noted in the National Geographic online article that prompted this one, walking is the slowest form of travel, but “the quickest route to our more authentic selves.” And walking, socially distanced yet not isolated, can be a perfect pandemic activity.
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Photo: FAWCO walkers in Haarlem, The Netherlands