"Walking"

 

This is the week of Passover; today is Good Friday and Sunday is Easter – a time to celebrate and to be thankful for the greatness of God. As for those of us who do not always get our religion packaged, a walk through the woods, to commune with nature, provides a sense of reverence – for a Being or a Spirit that is greater than anyone of us.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

April 7, 2023

“Walking”

 

“I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. When body and mind are out of

gear…I know that I shall only have to call in my doctors, and I shall be well again.”

                                                                                                                George M. Trevelyan (1876-1962)

                                                                                                                Clio, A Muse and Other Essays, 1913

 

6,198 steps. That is what my iPhone tells me I have done so far today, at 3:00pm on April 4. But that is more than most days; I averaged 4,911 steps in March. Of course, the weather was worse then, and today is beautiful. Nevertheless, I am a piker compared to my wife. She just returned with the news that her Fitbit has her at 14,883 steps. Walking is healthy for the body and the mind. In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” 

 

Bertrand Russell reviewed George Trevelyan’s essay in the December 4, 1913 issue of The Cambridge Review. In it he wondered whether Providence had placed Oxford and Cambridge “at exactly the right distance from London for a comfortable day’s walk.” The philosopher Russell, who died in 1970 at the age of 97, must have had a strong constitution and long legs, as each city is about 60 miles from London’s center – 15 hours at four miles per hour! Even an Olympian, walking at a record pace, could not make the trek in under eight hours.

 

Shortly after he died in May 1862, Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” was published in The Atlantic Monthly. His preference was to saunter, a word, he mused, that might be derived from idle people in the Middle Ages who, looking for handouts, claimed they going to the Holy Land, la Sainte Terre; thus, they became known as the “Sainte Terrers.” He added, however, others believed the word comes from sans terre, meaning without land, but in a good sense: “having no home, but equally at home everywhere.” “My vicinity,” Thoreau wrote, “affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day…I have not yet exhausted them.” The same could be said for where I live – a hundred acres of trails, abutting a thousand acre preserve.

 

In her 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit wrote that Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett’s “solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social atmosphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think…” Seventy-eight years ago, following two and a half months of combat, my father had similar thoughts. Then with the 10^th Mountain Division and camped along Italy’s Lago di Garda’s eastern shore and having covered 250 miles on foot, he wrote my mother on May 3, 1945: “I was able to go for a little walk today and enjoyed myself. I discovered that when you walk without a pack or rifle you practically feel as if you were floating through the air.” 

 

Today, I enjoy woodland walks, with their seasonal marvels. In Forest Walking, Peter Wohlleben wrote of trees in springtime: “As they transition from a restful winter to being more active in spring, they are pushing more water than usual up their trunks.” Without pack or rifle, I have leisure to think. Often I bring pen and paper and jot down random thoughts, most of which get discarded, but every now and then one germinates and blossoms into an essay, like this one.