The walking cure: Pep and power from walking : how to cure disease by walking

Product Information

Wild is not a book of advice, but it was received in much this same spirit. Its readership has surpassed not only that of her last book but that of books, period — “All these people who don’t even read have read Wild,” Strayed says — and fans show up at her events in a fervor to meet her. “I never imagined Wild would be read as inspirational,” Strayed says — never mind that her writing had been described as such for two years before the memoir came out. “But it’s the No. 1 thing people say to me now: ‘I was so inspired by your book.’” Yes, take care of your own needs, he says, but do not rest until everyone else is warm and comfortable. That is how Aboriginal people, and all Canadians, used to live. And that is why his grandfather—who took young Stanley hunting and fishing in the bush outside Pessamit—would be rolling over in his grave if he saw how greed and self-interest had supplanted the ethos of sharing and self-sufficiency among his people today. But in adulthood, she fell into a pattern familiar to many of us – days spent hunching towards a computer, evenings prone on the sofa. Working out in the gym, but using the car to get there. The combination of desk job and driving made her body “rounder, softer, achier, stiffer, stooped” and her mind anxious and unsettled. She made a resolution to do as much as she could on foot, getting a dog and proper wet-weather gear for extra motivation.

Cheryl Strayed touches a slate-gray band on her wrist. “My Fitbit,” she says. “We’re going to get our 10,000 steps.” Strayed and I are heading out for a stroll in Portland, Oregon, in the kind of weather for which that city is famous: not raining, but not not-raining, and certainly not ­certainly-not-going-to-rain. Strayed is undeterred, either because she’s lived here for nearly two decades, or because she once walked for 94 days in every conceivable meteorological condition, or because she really wants those 10,000 steps. She is wearing jeans and hiking boots — the lightweight kind that work for bumming around a city, or anyway around this city — and no coat, and the Fitbit. In the same vein, I love proto-existentialist Kierkegaard’s letter to his niece of 1847: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it … But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus, if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.” On the face of it, that kind of tale risks being unpalatable to the American ­public, never mind wildly popular. That Wild succeeded anyway is an achievement, and an instructive one. In a ­culture with profoundly ambivalent feelings about independent women, it is not always clear what kind of adventures we will be lauded for undertaking, nor what kind of tales we will be lauded for telling. So why did so many people fall in love with Strayed and her story? The bored person wanders around the house, wondering what to do. The walker, setting out, has nothing to do but walk; put one foot in front of the other, repeat and repeat. The eyes no longer wonder or wander, they focus on the path. Just by stepping out of the house and beginning to move, the walker has gone from aimlessness to purposeful activity. Perhaps walking provides a mental salve because one is actually doing something, even if this is as simple as putting one foot in front of the other. One has the impression of moving forward because one is literally moving forward.And then there’s the sheer mileage, at speed. Is this a workout? Not so much. “It’s a very different thing. Though, honestly, it took me an entire year initially to get over myself, because I had that sort of hangover like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me, I mean you’re an athlete and here you are at age 54 and what do you mean you’re going for a walk… .’ But it’s a creative, meditative act, rather than a what’s-my-heart-rate kind of thing.” At an initial glance, walking seems rather unproductive, similar in many ways to spending time in prayer. There are usually far faster modes of transportation. Additionally, if one walks for exercise, it initially appears to be less efficient than other types of exercise that will raise your heart rate much faster.

In John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1678, a young man named Christian leaves the City of Destruction and sets out on a journey. His travels take him across the Slough of Despond, up Hill Difficulty, through the Valley of Humiliation — and so on, until finally he crosses the River of Death and is welcomed in Celestial City. More than this, walking, like prayer, makes me feel more like a human being, rather than a human doing. Sure, I could travel in a way that is far faster or spend my time producing more, but I often feel most liberated when I realize that I don’t always have to produce. I don’t always have to rush from place to place. I slowly learn with each step that life is not about efficiency or productivity. Strayed came to this body of work late — after she wrote Wild — and she does not identify with it. “It’s this educated white guy who spends a lot of time roaming around his properties,” she says, “plus usually a pretty intellectual, dry way of writing about the natural world. And we very seldom hear anything about the interior life.”

The latest from america

Ed. Note: Every soloist has a personal Operating System — some are just more intentional than others. They can govern anything from guiding principles to strategic tactics to (seemingly small) routine practices. Some are about competing better or working more productively. Others are about satisfying the kind of hunger that attracts so many to the solo life in the first place: the desire to live in a richer, slower, more engaged, and self-determined way. To find one’s groove. Fear The Walking Dead went nuclear in season 5, with the main group of survivors crashing into a heavily radiated area, before season 6 ended with the villainous Teddy setting off a nuke in Texas. Based on her observations during the fallout, Fear The Walking Dead's June speculated that radiation could save someone from a zombie bite, and has spent the best part of a seven-year time skip working with PADRE to prove this hypothesis. The key line comes in Fear The Walking Dead season 8, episode 2, in which June discusses a bitten patient, admitting, " It stopped the infection, but the amount of radiation that it took just made things worse for her." Doctor: They weren’t here when it happened. When you all did what you did. They were at the conference. In Toledo. Or you could sample the self-care-focused strolling of amiable Mancunian TikTokkers @softgirlswhohike, inclusive ambling demonstrating that “hiking doesn’t have to be hard”.