We may be getting smarter (jury's still out on that). Getting back to the basics is probably the best way to make our bodies work optimally. The other day I read a post by Michael Moore about walking. I'm not really any kind of Michael Moore fan but I have to say I agree with most of what he said this time.
Essentially, this Facebook post talks about the walking he started last March. He, according to the post, has walk everyday since he started. And unlike many of us, he's not doing it to be healthier or to lose weight -- he's just walking to walk because he's actually enjoying it. He asserts that health and weight loss may be a byproduct but the real benefits come from doing something we are designed to do....just walk.
And now for another endorsement for walking, author Wayne Curtis has authored this (it's not really a "quick read" but it may just change how you think about walking):
The Walking Tour Skipping StepsExploring the lost art of the in-depth walk.
When I walk down Dumaine, I’m often trailed by a half-dozen or so tourists,
and I’m trying to tell them the story of the city. I volunteer for a nonprofit
group, and once a month or so I lead architectural walking tours of the French
Quarter. The tour lasts about two hours. Along the way, I try to offer up some
small insights into the French Quarter and how it got that way. That Dumaine
Street won’t cooperate with my narrative is an affront each and every time.
First we pass lovely Creole cottages from the 1820s, and then a proud 1788
raised wood-sided structure built in the French colonial style. Next door is a
townhouse with an entrance characteristic of the mid-19th century. Just up the
block is a house with flat roof that was typical of the 18th century Spanish
period, showing up like a friend late for a party. Then next door is a pair of
shotgun-style houses with millwork frippery dating to the second half of the
19th century. It’s as if the city had carted out houses for a yard sale, and
just left them along the curb without any plot or plan.
I talk a minute or two about each, but I always feel that I’ve failed in my
job. We’re all hardwired for a story with beginning, a middle, and an end, and
here I’ve just spouted random, unconnected anecdotes about a grab-bag of
different styles. For someone who grew up reading novels and book-length
non-fiction, I feel like I’ve been reduced to tweeting the history of the French
Quarter.
Modern life, of course, keeps getting more chopped, diced and disjointed.
Nonfiction seems to be getting shorter and shorter (magazine editors no longer
even apologize to writers for assigning “listicles” or “charticles”). And the
long walk has gradually become disaggregated into a series of miniature marches,
each now with its own purpose. Anything more than 140 characters or a few dozen
steps begins to feel burdensome; we grow restless. The walking tour I lead
clocks in at just under mile, and for some visitors that qualifies as adventure
travel.
How much do Americans typically walk in a day? A study published in 2010
rigged up 1,136 Americans with pedometers, and concluded that we walk an average
of 5,117 steps every day. (No surprise: that was significantly less than in
other countries studied — both Australians and the Swiss walked around 9,600
steps daily, and the Japanese 7,100.)
It’s also widely assumed that we walk far less than our forebears, but that’s
tough to prove — you won’t find much in the way of pedometer studies from the
19th century. But we can draw some conclusions from other information — like how
many kids walk to school today versus the past. In the 19th century, of course,
everyone walked to school, since buses didn’t exist and districts were designed
to accommodate walking. By 1969 more than half of all school kids still walked
to school. Today, it’s about 13 percent.
Another: A study of Old Order Amish in southern Canada in 2004 recruited
nearly a hundred adults to wear pedometers for a week. This is a little like
using pedometers in the 19th century; the Amish don’t have cars or tractors, and
still get around in large part by foot and horse-drawn carriage. The average
number of steps per day for Amish men, it turned out, came in at 18,425. For
women it was 14,196 steps.
America was once the land of the long walk, at least if you didn’t have the
means to ride a horse, or, starting around 1900, to drive a car. We walked and
walked, and the process both learned and told our own stories and that of the
land around us. Walking stitched together our nation with tight, durable seams,
not like high-speed highways that render stitching that’s sloppy, loose, and
easily undone. Undertaking a 10- or 15-mile mile walk was once something
Americans might do routinely in an afternoon. No special note was made of it. In
1906, just as cars were coming into vogue, the nation was afflicted by a small
outbreak of long-distance walking — multi-day walking races and long-distance
walkers seemed to be tromping everywhere. A splenetic editorial in American
Gymnasia magazine took a dim view of the attention being lavished on the
long-distance walks. “It is simply another mark of the degree of physical
degeneracy (is that too strong a term?) of the present day that long walks are
uncommon enough to excite special attention — not 1,200 mile walks but even
50-mile trips. And for most of us ten miles is a distance to cover which we must
use much effort, and having made it are quite sure to indulge in self-praise.”
That 5,000 steps we take each day translates into about two and a half miles
every day, or 900 miles per year. That’s not insubstantial. But I’m pretty sure
the quality of our walks has also changed — when we move by foot today — at
least in my experience and what I hear from others — it always seem to involve
brief, intense tromps motivated by a single purpose. We walk to the garage to
get to the car. We walk from the mall parking lot to Best Buy. We walk from Gate
4 to Gate 22 in Terminal B.
Essentially, we tweet with our feet.
What do we lose by walking less, and breaking up our walks into
Halloween-candy sized missions? We lose that opportunity to tightly stitch
together our world. A long walk — it takes about three hours to walk 10 miles,
and without breaking a sweat — gives us time with our thoughts, and establishes
the right speed to appreciate the complexity of the world around us. It gives us
time to plait the warp of random observations and the woof of random thought. We
create a narrative and a place. Americans drive an average of 13,400 miles each
year, or about 36 miles a day. The one time people spend long periods alone with
their thoughts tends to be in a car — on long drives or stuck in traffic. But
it’s not the same. In a car, we’re cocooned, isolated from a complex environment
that can engage us.
And as traffic historian Tom Vanderbilt has noted, our highway system today
essentially mimics “a toddler’s view of the world, a landscape of outsized,
brightly colored objects and flashing lights” as we speed along “smooth, wide
roads marked by enormous signs.” Heading down an on-ramp to merge onto a
highway, it’s as if we’re entering a day care center for adults. We push on
pedals and turn a big wheel. We communicate with others by blaring a horn that
plays a single note, or by employing a hand signal that involves a single
finger.
“‘The pedestrian mind doesn’t get very far in a day, but it has the
opportunity to see where it is going,” noted a writer in the Saturday Review
of Books. That was written in 1928, and even then — when the gulf between
walking and driving was scarcely a gully — he could see the outlines of two
differing ways of thinking: The walking mind and the driving mind. (“Vehicular
minds move under some other power than themselves and hence grow flabby and
become crowd minds, standardized and imitative.”)
On our tweet-length, mission-driven walks we remain cloistered in the
sanctuary of our minds, focused on our immediate goal. I don’t think I’m alone
in saying that I’ve never an interesting thought walking from the outer edge of
a parking lot to the entrance of a big box store. I’m too wrapped up in plotting
my mission, figuring out how to get in and out as efficiently as possible.
Nicholas Carr in his 2010 book, The Shallows, suggested,
essentially, that Google was making us stupid. He cited one researcher who
noted, “the digital environment tends to encourage people to explore many topics
extensively, but at a more superficial level.” Carr went on to add, “skimming is
becoming our predominant mode of reading,” and we are adept at “non-linear
reading.” We lose our capacity for “in-depth reading.”
We also seem to be losing our capacity for in-depth walking. Walking is now
short-term scanning. Thoreau liked to spend four hours every day rambling, free
of tasks and immediate goals. He lamented that his fellow townsmen would recall
pleasant walks they’d taken a decade ago, but had “confined themselves to the
highway ever since.” “The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his
writing,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of his friend. “If shut up in the house, he
did not write at all."
On the French Quarter walking tours, I always hope to build connections to a
complex, fascinating past, sometimes ennobling, often troubling. I tell visitors
on my walking tours to make sure they look down so they don’t stumble on the
notoriously uneven walks, and look up so they don’t miss the notoriously
elaborate ironwork, which is essentially 19th century architectural bling.
But I also urge them to linger at hidden, gated walkways that run between or
beneath many French Quarter homes. These often lead to courtyards that are alive
with banana trees and bougainvillea and traces of lives once lived. These are
worlds invisible by car, and just as invisible to those on a project-driven
mission.
“Walking… validates the reality of the past in the present,” wrote Allice
Legat, a Canadian anthropologist, “and in doing so, continually re-establishes
the relations between place, story and all the beings who use the locale.”
I’m gradually coming to terms with the chronological chaos of Dumaine Street.
I’m letting go of the narrative I want to impose on the city. I’m now just
hoping to slow things down, and let those walking with me build their own
narrative and chronology from the small details along the way. •
21 December 2012
Wayne Curtis is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and the
author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10
Cocktails. He's currently working on a book about the history of walking in
America. Find him at his website or
follow him @waynecurtis.
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