Peripatetic Pedant Professes: These feet are made for walking

The day warmed up in a big hurry.

I wimped out of walking when the iPhone reported it was 81 outside.  "Maybe I will walk in the evening" I told myself as I tried to work on the syllabi for the new academic year that will begin soon.

Evening came.

It was a freaking 91 degrees even at  half-past-six.

I was left with only one option: walking canceled.

The day felt incomplete.

So, of course, a pretentious post on walking is the result!

This New Yorker essay, which notes that "people are made for walking, but we are not very good at it" includes extensive commentary on Frédéric Gros' A philosophy of walking:

The purpose of walking, he tells us, is not to find friends but to share solitude, “for solitude too can be shared, like bread and daylight”; the philosopher Kant’s life “was as exactly ruled as music manuscript paper”; when walking, the body “stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape.”

I like that interpretation.  To share solitude, with the river and the birds and the trees, and smiling--and the rare unsmiling--humans.  Well, even with those damn bugs.

Contemplative walking is Gros’s favored kind: the walking of medieval pilgrims, of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry David Thoreau, of Kant’s daily life. It is the Western equivalent of what Asians accomplish by sitting. Walking is the Western form of meditation: “You’re doing nothing when you walk, nothing but walking. But having nothing to do but walk makes it possible to recover the pure sensation of being, to rediscover the simple joy of existing, the joy that permeates the whole of childhood.”

I do wonder whether this view of life is a male perspective.  The stereotypical male is more comfortable with the solitude in many, ahem, walks of life than the typical females who are social even when it is about going to the restroom.  In any case, it works for me as a male.

I checked the weather app.

All clear to share solitude with the river--today, and for quite a few days more too.

Walk like an Egyptian. Or an American. Or an Indian. Walk!

The summer weather has been unpredictably up and down like a teenage girl's moods ;)  Last week, we flirted with triple-digit temperatures but fell short by a degree.  And then came a cold front from Alaska, which brought down to the high to the low sixties and dropped some record-breaking rain.  Well, the twentieth of an inch was a record for the calendar day.

Today, the weather was just perfect, like that teenage girl in an angelic mood.  (I know I will be in trouble with the female readers. hehe!)  My neighbors, who I rarely see going for a walk, were there as a lovely couple out on a midday stroll.  "What a lovely day" she said.  "Awesome" is what I told them.

I love the walk by the five-mile walk by the river.  Ok, it is a little more than four-and-a-half, which I round off to five. Try saying "I went for my four-and-a-half mile walk by the river" and then utter "I went for a five-mile walk by the river" and tell me which one is easier for the tongue and the brain!

That five-mile walk, I have always believed, is the most important factor contributing to my health.  Ok, there is no other physical activity and that makes it the only factor; happy now?  It is not merely the walking.  It is the time away from the gadgets. No reading.  No talking.  Listening to the sounds all around. Watching the goslings.  All add up to a relatively healthy body and mind.

And now I have evidence to back me on this: Doctors are prescribing a walk in the park:

[Dr. Robert Zarr] told me that exhorting patients to “get more exercise” was too vague. Last year, he decided to start trying something different. He stopped asking his patients, “Do you move?” and began asking “Where do you move?” He discovered that many spent very little time outdoors, and he began prescribing time outside for conditions as wide-ranging as ADHD, high blood pressure, asthma, obesity, anxiety, diabetes, and depression.

How about that!  If only more doctors prescribed walking, right?

The scientific breakthroughs of the 20^th century put a premium on treatments that could be tested in a lab. “The half-page advertisements for the Glen Springs Sanitarium gave way to the full-page advertisement for the anti-anxiety drug meprobamate,” Selhub and Logan write. Today, the idea of a doctor telling you to spend time in a pleasant climate seems like something out of Masterpiece Theatre, a quaint tonic from a bygone era available only to those of the leisure class.

How terrible!

Intuitively, it probably doesn’t seem surprising that kids who run around in the woods are less fidgety when they do have to pay attention. Or that the smell of a pine forest is so pleasant that it soothes anxiety. But even if the mechanisms aren’t entirely clear, a steadily growing stack of scientific evidence suggests that time in nature is really good for you. Why don’t we embrace this idea of healthy nature more fully? Perhaps popping a pill is less daunting than an overhaul of our daily routines.
Or maybe we don’t think that our environments matter.

One of the best things that the corrupt government in Chennai did was to invest in the dilapidated parks.  As my blog posts from my visits to Chennai show, I am not the only one at those parks--if I don't go there early enough, then it gets crowded, which is wonderfully heart-warming to the intellectual in me but the crowd itself is not what I can handle ;)

So far, Zarr and his team have given out 600 prescriptions for nature. “It’s not a panacea,” he said, “but we’ve touched on something exciting.”

Surely you don't need Zarr's prescription, right?  Then, why are you still reading this?  Get up and get going.  Go for that  four-and-a-half mile walk ;)

Letter of the day

From the NY Times:

Thank you for your article about cellphone-addicted pedestrians.
I am a disabled woman who walks with the aid of two canes. Just recently, I was leaving my local train station, and a man, talking animatedly on his cellphone, kicked one of my canes as he rushed past. I bobbled badly but managed not to fall. I found the man outside the station still talking. I tapped him on the shoulder several times, and when he took no notice, I yelled, “You kicked my cane and I nearly fell!”
His irritated response? “I can’t talk now. Can’t you see I’m on the phone?”
Stephanie Patterson
Collingswood, N.J., Jan. 17, 2010

This letter was in response to a NY Times story on pedestrians being distracted because of cellphones; excerpt:

Slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 because they got distracted and tripped, fell or ran into something while using a cellphone to talk or text. That was twice the number from 2007, which had nearly doubled from 2006, according to a study conducted by Ohio State University, which says it is the first to estimate such accidents.
“It’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Jack L. Nasar, a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State, noting that the number of mishaps is probably much higher considering that most of the injuries are not severe enough to require a hospital visit. What is more, he said, texting is rising sharply and devices like the iPhone have thousands of new, engaging applications to preoccupy phone users.