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Unintended (and most important) consequence of the walk, #2: “I’m not sure I like these words particularly, but the walk has become a sort of ‘radical act of self-care.’ The thing about setting aside an hour, for yourself, outside (or sitting with a cup of tea if that’s your thing), is that it creates space for ideas, hard subjects, feelings, all to reside and exist and rumble. Life is brilliant, and messy, and joyous, and sometimes I go for a walk and I feel like I just finished it in about 30 seconds because my brain is lit up with, just, joy. Not always, but more often than I’d ever have imagined.” After credits roll on The Walking Dead: World Beyond, a post-credits scene (COMPLETELY unrelated to anything that happens in World Beyond) begins in a dilapidated lab covered in dust, cobwebs, and French graffiti. When translated to English that graffiti reads “The Dead Were Born Here.” A woman, later revealed to be a doctor or medical scientist, arrives at the lab and watches an old video transmission from a special guest star (more on him in a minute). Her computer time is interrupted by the arrival of a man who points a gun at her. My conversation with Vollant continued to resonate. “When you begin a journey, you don’t know why,” he had said sagely. “The trail will show you the way.” That last charge is not entirely fair (John Muir: “Going out, I found, was really going in”), and the middle one is a matter of taste. But the first one is inarguable. For a long time, most nature writers were wealthy white property owners, and walking alone outdoors was not an option for women. (Men get to be flâneurs, those peripatetic observers of urban life, but a woman walking the streets has a notably different connotation. And the reputation of women in the woods is scarcely better — the most famous examples being, after all, witches.) Moreover, women were not regarded as credible chroniclers of their surroundings, a status extended automatically to educated white men. “The authoritative voice that white men of privilege have assumed, and have also been granted — that is the difference between their voice and mine,” Strayed says. “I make no attempt to be the authority.”
So … what pictures get ‘likes’? “Pictures that have kind of an inherent romance to them, as if there’s a story waiting to bubble out of the photograph rather than it being simply an accurate depiction of what’s shot. There’s something left unsaid, something that needs to be told.”I agree with Jesuit Scholastic Michael Rossmann that walking is good for body and soul. My cardiologist told me to do some walking daily to keep my heart working better. At 81 its difficult for me to walk much but I walk as much as I can with help from my “third leg” – my cane! As a kid all I did was walk, and also in my early later years. Once on one of my sidewalk walks I spotted a newly hatched but unfortunately dead baby bird fallen from its nest, which I removed preventing people from stepping on it and I place the little creature on the soil near shrubbery. Sidewalk conversations happen easily and can sometimes become reciprocal learning moments, uplifting and underlined with smiles. And it’s true as Mr. Rossmann said, as one walks one can “smell the roses” that is, become aware of lots of beauty often missed. Compare Thoreau’s journal declaration of August 1851: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow … A thousand rills which have their rise in the sources of thought burst forth and fertilize my brain.” Terpenes are a type of organic compound produced by plants, part of a protection system against insects, disease and rot. They are the reason pine trees smell piney and citrus trees smell citrussy. They are also one of the reasons humans are drawn to trees. The presence of these tiny molecules has an anti-inflammatory effect on the body. Laboratory research has shown that the terpene a-pinene, found in conifers such as our yew tree, could have properties that prevent cancer. Studies on the citrus compound D-limonene suggest it is an effective mood-booster and antidepressant. by David A. Sasso, MD, MPH, for the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry Committee on the Arts and Humanities. I wanted to show people all the reasons there were to walk,” she says. “Even in the darkness, even in the rain, there will be something that part of us will respond to, whether that’s physiological or emotional or cognitive. I didn’t want to be the person who was just telling everyone to get their 10,000 steps.”
We have a name for what Strayed experienced: the American Dream. With living-wage jobs declining and class stratification increasing, that dream is ever more elusive, but Strayed is among those who achieved it. Through hard work, higher education, and very little in the way of outside help, she raised herself out of poverty and into the middle class. Eventually, of course, she rose even higher, into the kind of glamour — text messages from Oprah — that even the American Dream can only dream of. But it is the basic bootstrapping from poverty to self-sufficiency that we observe in Wild, and that helps make its story so automatically appealing. The anthropologist Tim Ingold proposes a gressive ontology that distinguishes wayfaring from navigation. Wayfaring is an autotelic way of being in a mesh-worked world of lines in which cognition is distributed palpably over the body. In navigation, by contrast, passages are transitions merely between nodes of a fixed teleological network, where the human is reduced to a passenger, sedentary even at the controls of the capsule, the path he or she follows a mere relay between stations. The wayfarer travels not across a territory but along it, part of the world’s restless coming into being: I don’t mean to suggest that Wild is fundamentally a rags-to-riches tale. It is not. But the book succeeded in part because of the way it fits into the prevailing stories we tell about three things: about class, about women, and about suffering. Those stories are not separable, of course. The American Dream, for instance, is a fantasy of self-reliance, but our culture is iffy on self-reliant women. Well, there is a LOT we can glean from that. It’s unknown who the gunman is or what organization he is with, but if he’s right, then French medical researchers were responsible for both the start of the zombie apocalypse and for “making it worse.” The fact that the doctor doesn’t dispute any of these claims makes it likely that these teams of French doctors, two of which are named “Primrose” and “Violet”, caused the end of the world. Any doctor who could be found has been jailed for their crimes.THE WALKING CURE Reader's Digest Canada | April 2020 How a daily stroll improves your mental health, boosts your social life and cuts your risk of chronic disease - Christina Frangou T he next morning, fuelled by rabbit pie and spaghetti with moose sauce, we cross frozen Lac-Saint-Paul and zigzag along a series of secondary highways, leaving behind Atikamekw territory and moving deeper into Anishinabe land. Pulks don’t glide well on gravel shoulders, so the logisticians load our sleds into a cube van, and we average twenty-seven kilometres a day for five days. Scientists, however, are starting to see how intense exercise is not necessarily the secret to losing weight; one may then be more likely to chow down and be lazy during the rest of the day, whereas simply incorporating more walking into one’s daily routine might be more effective for reducing one’s waistline.
Strayed was born far from here, in central Pennsylvania, the second of three children. Her father was abusive. Her mother was hardworking, optimistic, patient with adversity, vocal and unconditional in her love for her kids. When Strayed was 5, the family moved to Minnesota; the next year, her mother left her father. Eventually she remarried, this time to a man who doted on the family and helped build them a home in rural northern Minnesota. Strayed graduated from high school, went to the University of Minnesota, fell in love, and got married while still a student. Her mother, who had missed out on higher education earlier in life, enrolled in college when Strayed did. She startled her daughter by earning straight A’s, then stunned her by getting diagnosed with lung cancer. She died just 49 days later, a 45-year-old senior in college, two classes shy of graduation. That would constitute a dramatic development in anyone’s life, or afterlife, but Strayed downplays the impact Wild’s success has had on her and her family. “I have not changed at all,” she says, “and my life hasn’t changed except in one regard, which is that I have enough money to pay my bills for the first time ever.” Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Twice a day, after breakfast and before supper, we have formed a circle and held hands. There are prayers, technical briefings about our route, and then, finally, Vollant speaks. “We are bonding,” he says each time, “like a big family.” Many have written about the details of the encounter. Mahler had been working on his never completed 10th symphony and had become greatly distressed that his wife, Alma, was having an affair with architect Walter Gropius (whom Alma would go on to marry 4 years after Mahler’s death). Freud made several interpretations that astounded Mahler, including surmising the name of Mahler’s mother and identifying a “mother fixation,” suggesting that Mahler was “seeking his mother in every woman.” 1 This analysis gave Mahler some relief and helped him to connect 2 childhood memories: a scene of conflict between his parents and hearing a folk-song played on a hurdy-gurdy in the street. Freud later recalled, “Mahler thought from this moment on, deep tragedy and superficial entertainment were tied together indissolubly in his soul and that one mood was inevitably tied to the other.” 2
Analogously, one can look around and see how there’s a whole lot of work we need to do in the world—starting with ourselves and our families—and that prayer can initially seem like something that takes time away from the more important action. As you ponder these questions, if you have never listened to the first movement of Mahler’s painfully gorgeous and unfinished Symphony No. 10, find a moment to do so this month in honor of a peripatetic therapy session that took place 110 years ago. Instead, Strayed belongs to a different and more demotic group of people who walk countless miles outside and alone. These are the religious pilgrims: the Muslim walking to Mecca, the Buddhist to Bodh Gaya, the Hindu to Puri, the Catholic to Lourdes. (Ancient Jews made pilgrimages to the Temple at Jerusalem, but that was destroyed 2,000 years ago. More modern Jews do not traditionally walk, possibly because, traditionally, we flee. This could be a generalizable truth: People in diaspora stay put when they can.) Religious pilgrims walk outdoors, but their fundamental journey is inward, undertaken to improve the state of their soul. So, too, with Strayed. The subtitle of Bill Bryson’s book is Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. The subtitle of hers is From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. When the sun shines down on the water you get twice as much light, so you get twice the serotonin boost’: Annabel Street. Photograph: Kate Peters/The Observer
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