Some of my earliest memories are of going to Penn State football games. Crisp fall days, leaves rustling, idyllic college campus, corduroys (they were in style when I was kid) and sweaters, and the sun breaking through clouds and trees. My family is a family of routine. Or at least it was then. We would drive to State College – either all the way from Philadelphia or from my grandparent’s place in Lebanon, PA. On our drive, it seemed like “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey” always played and “Take the Long Way Home” felt like it was a close second. The car heater had that car heater smell – a little dusty, a little musty. We would typically park in the same downtown parking lot. We would always have breakfast at the Pancake Cottage – this is where my love for pancakes and bacon and sausage and well…breakfast came from. We would go to every. single. bookstore. As a treat, we might go to the two arcades along College Avenue.
Over the years, some of the traditions changed. For one, my parents got divorced so we no longer spent weekends in Lebanon, and the family dynamic was different. The Pancake Cottage closed down and breakfast moved over to The Corner Room or The Waffle Shoppe. The Arcades also disappeared, and slowly the bookstores became PEnn State clothing stores. After a while – when I was a student living up there – driving three-and-a-half hours there and three-and-a-half hours back (on a good day) got old and my dad started renting rooms at a local hotel for the weekend.
The thing that didn’t change over all of those years was the long-ish walk from downtown State College to the large erector set stadium on the far north east side of campus. As a little kid, this walk was pure torture. The first part of the walk was all up hill. I’m sure I whined almost every time to be carried. The one saving grace of the walk was a set of underground tunnels that allowed you to cross and intersection every which way. The tunnels always reeked of urine, which never stopped my brother or I from racing ahead into the tunnels and popping up at street level on the other side. As we got closer to the stadium, a little past the chicken coops, I learned to keep up with my father’s brisk pace of walking and never lose sight of him or my brother – tens of thousands of people were making these Saturday pilgrimages and it was easy for a little tyke to get lost.
For as much as I loathed that walk as kid, I now try to walk everywhere and every chance that I can. 90 degrees out, sure, I don’t mind walking it. 20 degrees, I can walk in that too. 20 minutes, why not? An hour, ok. Groceries, markets, wine store, dinner, beer, bar, I walk for just about anything or anywhere. People here in Memphis, the few that I know, often think I’m crazy for the amount of walking I do (I’ve known people to drive two blocks from the office to a restaurant). When I visit other cities, I want to walk the town, let my feet and eyes get to know the spaces. I’ll intentionally drive two hours for day of walking in the woods. Nearly every time I apply for a job, I look for a neighborhood nearby that might be walkable as a potential place to live. More than a few of my blog posts have been based on thoughts I’ve had while out for a walk. Not too long ago, back in Bucks county, PA, I would have morning or midday meetings in Doylestown, PA and would drive past a park on my way back to the office. So many times, I wanted to call out for the rest of the day just to stop and go for a long walk. As it turns out, I probably should have.
Yesterday, my news feed featured a 2019 article from the Guardian on (drum roll….) walking. In it, the author has a walking conversation with neuroscientist, Shane O’Mara (who published a book on the benefits of walking In Praise of Walking). According to O’Mara and a number of studies, walking is not only good physical activity, but it is great brain activity.
He cites a 2018 study that tracked participants’ activity levels and personality traits over 20 years, and found that those who moved the least showed malign personality changes, scoring lower in the positive traits: openness, extraversion and agreeableness. There is substantial data showing that walkers have lower rates of depression, too. And we know, says O’Mara, “from the scientific literature, that getting people to engage in physical activity before they engage in a creative act is very powerful. My notion – and we need to test this – is that the activation that occurs across the whole of the brain during problem-solving becomes much greater almost as an accident of walking demanding lots of neural resources.”
So many times, I’ve come back from a walk feeling like my brain is firing on a different level – like I’m contemplating lots of different problems and solutions and endeavors. Sometimes I feel like I notice everything and the world becomes a poem or a novel. Walking makes me attuned. Everywhere I look there’s a moment in time with a complete backstory and a whole lot more yet to be written. Sometimes on my walks (often), I brood and think deeply about what it means to be a human being. While I suspect these thoughts and this capacity have always been present, walking seems to have unleashed them or given space to them in a different way. In talking with O’Mara, the author recounts:
I witnessed the brain-healing effects of walking when my partner was recovering from an acute brain injury. His mind was often unsettled, but during our evening strolls through east London, things started to make more sense and conversation flowed easily. O’Mara nods knowingly. “You’re walking rhythmically together,” he says, “and there are all sorts of rhythms happening in the brain as a result of engaging in that kind of activity, and they’re absent when you’re sitting. One of the great overlooked superpowers we have is that, when we get up and walk, our senses are sharpened. Rhythms that would previously be quiet suddenly come to life, and the way our brain interacts with our body changes.”
There were a lot of things I enjoyed about my last relationship, but one of the things I enjoyed most was our “family walks.” Nearly every evening that we were together, we would take the dog for a walk around the neighborhood. It was nice to talk and to connect (a little less nice to have to pick up dog crap with a plastic bag), but I suspect something else was happening in our brains. We were finding rhythms that maybe we didn’t know existed.
And it’s not just me. I don’t count myself among the pantheon of great thinkers and writers, but many of them extolled, and practiced, the virtues of walking.
O’Mara’s ultimate ode to urban walking is TS Eliot’s 1915 poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock,” which he describes as “a journey on foot, and a journey through states of mind”. Wordsworth composed poetry as he wandered, while Aristotle delivered lectures on foot in the grounds of his school in Athens. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche memorably said that “only thoughts reached by walking have value”, a notion that Charles Dickens – who was as prolific a walker as he was a writer – would no doubt have seconded.
If I’m at all hesitant to go back to the working world, it’s because of it’s increasing demands on our time. So many jobs keep one chained to a desk. They bring in lunch and frame it as a perk so that teams have a working lunch. Workers are praised for their dedication when they work through lunch. Bosses email and text after hours in a cult-like “always on” lifestyle. For those who want to stay physically active, they have to find time to squeeze in a workout at the gym (there’s certainly not enough time in the day for a two-hour stroll). From the article:
Some people, I point out, don’t think walking counts as proper exercise. “This is a terrible mistake,” he says. “What we need to be is much more generally active over the course of the day than we are.” And often, an hour at the gym doesn’t cut it. “What you see if you get people to wear activity monitors is that because they engage in an hour of really intense activity, they engage in much less activity afterwards.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’d like a paycheck, and I enjoy a decent run, but ever since being unemployed, I’ve had the privilege to experience, first-hand, the freedom and a spark that walking provides. It’s become one of those simple pleasures, like a clean and simple meal or a good cup of coffee – it’s one of those things that seem to reveal life’s rich abundance hiding in plain sight. In some respects, it’s a little like falling in love. Once you’ve experienced it, you start to think that you can’t ever go back to not having it in your life.