Walking the best medicine

The phrase "Walking is man's best medicine," was allegedly spoken by Hippocrates two millennia ago and it is even more timely today. This fact is particularly true in industrialized societies where new technologies have not only changed the way we work but, even more profoundly, have also affected our life styles by reducing the physical effort of most of our daily activities.

Overweight and obesity are thus becoming more and more serious problems within societies where people would rather drive than walk. This single decline in physical exertion that day-to-day life requires, combined with excessive food consumption is a dangerous combination. With very few exceptions, all of us are victims of this deadly duo.

Still, we cannot turn back the clock or discard new technologies simply to regain the slim, supple, and fit bodies of our ancestors. However, we can use walking, not just for the utilitarian purpose of transport, but rather for pleasure and improved health by incorporating it into our daily routine. One cannot overrate the many benefits of walking since there is strong scientific evidence to support them

Walking in a city is the greatest unpriced pleasure there is. Urban walking with no aim but sensation—the solitary pleasures of the stroller or flâneur—is of course a recent phenomenon, a legacy of modernity. As Frédéric Gros says in his book-length ramble through the topic, "A Philosophy of Walking", the "urban stroller is subversive. He subverts the crowd, the merchandise and the town, along with their values. The walker of wide-open spaces, the trekker with his rucksack opposes civilization with the burst of the clean break, the cutting-edge of a rejection.

But it is less a philosophy than an easy stroll through anecdotes about various big-brained walkers. We meet the usual suspects: Aristotle in the streets of Athens, Kant on his watch-setting daily round in Königsberg, Nietzsche striding the hills of Europe seeking relief for his syphilitic headaches and Proust’s wistful narrative of the Guermantes Way.

Well, Mr Gross, maybe sometimes a stroll is just a stroll. And he misses other ambivalences of flânerie, for instance its too-easy association with the male gaze: the cruising glance of appraisal that sizes up a shop window and a pretty boy or girl in just the same proprietary manner.

 "By walking you are not going to meet yourself," Gros says in an early chapter on the "freedoms" of perambulation. "By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. … The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life." 

Compared with reading a novel or watching a film, walking is at best a mild form of bracketing the burden of identity. The country walker who breaks with civilization, perhaps seeking thereby the sublime experience of being overawed by nature, still knows that the self can never be left entirely behind—for that self’s desires are what brought you out of routine actions and into the special reflective clearing of the walk. Wherever you go, there you are.

Even if one were inclined to agree with Gros’s vision of aimless walking—he is also against special shoes, clothing, and those pointed staffs that "are on sale to give walkers the appearance of improbable skiers"—he is awfully normative about the whole business. His demand for aimless, noncompetitive walking is just as judgmental and insistent as any other, and may sail closer to self-contradiction than most. You’re not doing aimlessness right! Walk this way!

Consider the spiritual pilgrimage, anyone’s model of a walk meant to bring about transformation; it is subject to all these same tangles of self and its loss. But we can never escape the conflicts of duty and pleasure, even in faith; nor can we escape ourselves in even the most purposeless journey. To be going nowhere in particular is still to be going.

More to the point, sometimes walking is the burden, not the release. Few characters in literature walk more than Thomas Hardy’s Tess, but she must do so from disadvantage, not in the interests of leisure or spiritualism. The suburban exiles who lack cars and live in districts poorly served by public transit, doggedly covering ground to fetch groceries from the nearest strip mall, are her modern descendants. They do not appear in Gros’s appreciation of bipedal motion.

Walking may be a kind of confession, a slowly moving portrait of failure, at least in terms of the modern city’s dominant movement-values. It is not really part of Gros’s purview—he lives in walkable Paris, after all—but we North Americans should always remember that the encroachment on walking opportunities by the postwar expansion of car-centric urban design is one of the signal failures of human vision in the 20th century.

But Gros is on the side of the angels when he notes that walking is "the best way to go more slowly." We can move faster, for centuries by horse and more lately by every conceivable conveyance pushed by internal combustion; but we cannot experience ourselves and the world as fully in any other manner. The jumbled record of sensations and ideas unique to the pace of walking is a distinctly human pleasure. "You need to start with two legs," Gros asserts without any irony; but he is correct. The upright posture is at once the highest achievement of Homo sapiens, our main sensory array lifted (as Freud notes) away from the smelly ground and into the clear air, and a constant invitation to fall forward in the two-legged gait that we alone, among the primates, have mastered. Walking is our thing, and because most of the human senses are lofted high atop the five or six feet most of us enjoy, the range of stimulus is wide. Our minds open, and we begin to ponder. We reflect or gather wool or argue inwardly; our minds are moving just as our feet do. But what size are the thoughts of walking?

"Each thought has a size," Nicholson Baker writes in his essay "The Size of Thoughts," "and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product. Large thoughts, thoughts with lasting heft, are crepuscular, complex, and slow to arrive, like "the unhasty, liquid pace of human thinking itself. But sometimes a thought that seems smallish and about to wrap up and stop may happen upon that loose-limbed, reckless acceleration, wherein this very thought may shamble forward, plucking tart berries, purchasing newspapers, and retrieving stray refuse without once breaking stride—risking a smile, shaking the outstretched hands of young constituents, loosening its tie! Then again, no: It was a false start, a spurt of speed without finishing class. Thoughts fizzle just like other human things."

The specific association of philosophy with walking is itself a middle-sized thought worth looking at a little harder. We call Aristotle’s philosophical school Peripatetic because legend holds that he liked to walk about as he lectured. His fondness for travel—born in Stagira, he was an outsider in Athens who ventured away on numerous occasions, most famously to tutor the truculent Alexander the Great—may also have been a factor. There is no internal evidence that his ideas are rooted in walking, except in the general sense that he believed in observation of the natural world as a prerequisite for science.

Even solitary philosophizing may prove less amenable to the stroll than we often imagine. It is sometimes said that it is impossible to have a real fight with someone while walking—we need the valences of face-to-face interaction to execute the business of emotional violence. The same may be true of genuine philosophical argument. Of course, one can always walk away from an opponent or interlocutor, as several vexed Athenians did when they encountered Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, and as ordinary people do all the time. But turning one’s back, like bursting into tears, is not an argument.

For many people, the walk or hike is less an occasion for thought than a respite from it, sometimes a necessary venting of pent-up energy that precisely (like much exercise) lacks the quality of thought: I walk to exhaust stress like a vapor trail. People often rave about how much mental stimulation they get out of walking and hiking—some even can write essays and book chapters in their head while walking. But when I walk or hike—much as I enjoy it—nothing happens in my head at all.  I wonder if that is entirely true—nothing at all?—but the essential point is important. Walking may stimulate thought, just as beauty may inspire goodness, but this connection is contingent, not necessary; there is a philosophical error lurking in any attempt to make the link stronger than happenstance.

There is a famous image of the mind sketched in Plato’s Theaetetus. Consciousness, Socrates says, might be like a giant aviary, with all species of birds flying in apparently random directions. The birds represent thoughts; they are all contained by the confines of the aviary, but it is not until one is captured that it reveals its dimensions, coloring, and habits. Only then can we say that we are truly thinking that thought: to have is not the same as to hold.

But the fact is that real thought ultimately requires stationary presence, supplication almost, before the machines of thinking: tables and chairs. We must eventually cease walking if we are truly to think.