While most of us have been marooned inside our respective dwellings, many have been forced to walk: a construction worker walking 30 kilometers to go home to his family located in a nearby province, a senior couple pushing a borrowed wheelchair for 20 kilometers back and forth to get the ailing wife to a kidney center for her dialysis, a fast- food employee walking 10 kilometers to his place of work, and so on.
If we had more walkable cities, with each neighborhood connected to one another, the health-care frontliners and essential workers wouldn’t have to worry about getting a ride to their hospitals where they are needed. So they hitch rides and risk being accosted and made to pay hefty fines!
Personally, I don’t mind walking if I have to. In the days B.C. (before Covid), when I had to go to the office or make an appointment somewhere, I would leave my old battered car somewhere, and get on a public- utility vehicle or mass transport. In between rides, I walked, and walked.
If you haven’t got into the walking habit, I highly recommend that you insert some walking into your daily commute, build it into your daily activity. Start small, such as light walking for short distances.
Walking can be rewarding. I mean it, literally. In my advertising days, there was a fellow named Mang Mat who used to deliver our printing proofs. He did not ride the public transpo. He preferred to walk from one ad agency to the next. He must have walked a thousand kilometers equivalent to the length of Luzon. Through the years of doing his task by walking, he had not only saved a lot on his transpo expenses, he had also picked up a lot of valuable stuff along the way: coins, paper money, screws, and even a wrist watch.
Let’s talk about the health benefits of walking, which you probably know already. Medical researchers have validated a number of clear health benefits to walking for seniors. Did you know that walking 25 minutes a day can add up to seven years to your lifespan? That’s according to a 2015 study at St. George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in London.
Walking may be the best form of physical exercise for older adults because it’s easy to get started with, it can be done at low or moderate intensity. It helps lubricate knee and hip joints and strengthens the surrounding muscles, reducing the strain placed on the joint itself.
A new United States research has found that increasing the amount of steps you walk each day could lower your blood pressure.
What I dig about walking is that it makes me feel the ground beneath my feet. I like standing and walking on solid ground. It helps me stay grounded, physically and metaphorically.
I like the phrase “being grounded.” To me the phrase describes a person who is sensible and has a good understanding of what is really important in life. To be grounded is the ability to maintain balance, stability, and presence of mind, no matter what is happening around you, and despite all the fame and praise.
Walking reminds me about the need to be humble. The root word of humble after all is humus, Latin for ground. When I walk, I walk with the so-called humble masses, the hoi polloi. I sweat in the heat of walking under the sun like them. I can smell the mingling of various scents. I see all kinds of faces. I imagine each individual walking as people with their own burdens.
This is why walking should be practiced by persons in public service. It is one way of getting a reality check on life as experienced by the people they are supposed to serve. It is also the kind of daily serum that should be injected into individuals who have risen to a higher social and economic level so they would never forget who they once were and where they came from. I know a lot of highly successful people, some of them my acquaintances who would rather erase the memories of their humble roots, because they are ashamed to be found out. You would never catch them walking on the streets or taking a public ride.
But there is another stimulating reason why I love to walk. It helps me think creatively. It triggers the flow of creative juices.
“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking,” said Friedrich Nietzsche. And he is certainly not the only genius to associate walking with creative inspiration. Nikola Tesla took long daily walks in a city park and claimed to have formed his ideas fully in his mind during these strolls before committing anything to paper. Steve Jobs insisted on “walking meetings” with business associates at Apple, especially when creative problem solving was required, something that Mark Zuckerberg and many others in Silicon Valley now emulate. Dozens of famous authors— Henry David Thoreau, L.M. Montgomery, J.K. Rowling, and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few—have said that walking is the only reliable cure to writer’s block.
Just looking at ordinary people and hearing them talk can inspire ideas. As an advertising copywriter, my antenna is up to pick up street lingo I can use in my copy. As a short story writer or scriptwriter, I look at people’s faces and I imagine them to be characters, characters about whom I can weave stories.
Science has confirmed that walking does indeed awaken creative ability. In one Stanford University study, researchers found that walking boosts creative output by 60 percent.
It could be, then, that walking, with its continuous involvement of left and right sides of the body as we shift from one foot to the other with each step, accommodates greater communication between the two hemispheres of the brain in the process of coordinating those movements. It’s as if when we walk, the two halves of our brains are having a conversation.
Where we walk matters as well. I vary the places where I walk. Sometimes in the alleys of Binondo or the narrow passageways of Quiapo where I used to source my pirated DVDs in another lifetime. Sometimes I amble and saunter through the hallways of an air-conditioned mall, just aimlessly looking and sniffing around. A walk through the Metro provides immediate stimulation—a greater variety of sensations for the mind to play with. But it can be over-stimulating, with all the pedestrians, cars, and billboards that zap and drain our attention.
A small but growing collection of studies suggests that spending time in green spaces—gardens, parks, forests—can rejuvenate the mind much better than city streets because a garden or a park allows our mind to drift casually from one sensory experience to another, from cascading water to rustling grasses and leaves, fluttering butterflies, the panoramic display of colorful flowers, and so on.
Unfortunately, Metro Manila is a no walking zone. It does not encourage oldies to walk more because it is a motor vehicle-first society. Even alleys and neighborhood streets are congested with vehicles, in spite of the number coding policy.
Perhaps there is a need to re-design our city landscapes and city ordinances. Maybe the lockdown we are going though should give us something really good to think about. Urban designers and planners, is it possible to connect neighborhoods and buildings and create more walkable neighborhoods so that in the next pandemic, we can ride a bicycle or walk to hospitals and public places without worrying about transportation? Let’s make our cities more walkable. Seriously.
I don’t see the transportation ban being lifted totally soon. So in the meantime, start training yourself by walking around the house and backyard or going up and down the stairs.