"Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house….In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not once in all that time.” --Ray Bradbury, “The Pedestrian”
I've always loved to walk; regardless of whatever benefits may accrue from it, it simply seems natural and human to do so. It gets me from one place to another, it allows me time to think and to reflect, and it’s an opportunity to appreciate and to explore my surroundings; it’s also my daily exercise.
True story: a friend of mine teaches Driver’s Ed here in Missoula. One day I was walking to work, and he and his students were in the car, stopped at a stop sign as I walked by. My friend told the student-driver to honk—“That’s a buddy of mine,” he said; and one of the students asked, with utter seriousness, “Why is he walking?” My friend had a hard time explaining.
For most of human existence, there was no need to convince people of the benefits of walking, for the simple reason that there was mostly no alternative. Times change, and these days walking (in America, at least) has become a lifestyle option: something that has to be extolled as a form of exercise, an opportunity for spiritual reflection, or a way to commune with nature, rather than simply being accepted as the normal human method for getting from one place to another. We’re not quite in the world of Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian,” where Leonard Mead ends up being arrested and sent off to “The Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies” because of his quaint habit of taking solitary late-night strolls; but we can see that world from here.
Habitual walkers take heart, however; writing at The New Yorker in defense of walking, Ferris Jabr informs us that walking, in addition to being entirely natural, is linked to creativity and to the processes of thinking and writing. Mr. Jabr has all sorts of science to prove it, too:
“What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.
“The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down.
“Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight.”
It's certainly reassuring that something I've always done as a matter of course turns out to be good for me. In fact, walking has so many benefits, it's almost as if humans were designed to do it.
Just something to think about while you're sitting in your car, stuck in traffic on your way to work...
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