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

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As we reconcile the challenges facing the practice of psychotherapy today with myriad restrictions necessary to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus, there are lessons to draw from the man whose legacy, unfortunately, is sometimes ridiculed as inflexible, rule-bound, and out-of-date. Dr Sasso is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and musician in New Haven, CT, where he serves as Assistant Clinical Professor in the Child Study Center at the Yale University School of Medicine. I first heard about the Innu Meshkenu (Innu Trail) project in 2010. Vollant and I spoke on the phone, and he invited me to join a walk. Then he returned to his busy life, lecturing at the Université de Montréal medical school, conducting clinics in remote Aboriginal communities, spending time with his three children, and walking more than 1,000 kilometres a year, while I got bogged down at my desk. Walking has also been demonstrated to hold a special affinity with creativity. In this sense, psychologists are merely evidencing what genius has always known: a plodding logic that is reflected in the later Latin phrase solvitur ambulando (it is solved by walking), given to us by Diogenes in the late 5th century BC. The work: DeLana works independently on several fronts — including a book on this exact aspect of her OS — while simultaneously remaining as fully jobbed-up as ever.

As a little girl, Streets fell in love with walking. She remembers being four or five years old and out near her grandparents’ house in Sheringham. The big skies and flat lands of the North Norfolk coast were “amazing, beautiful, these great swathes of sand…” and the small Annabel would walk for miles. ‘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 Granted, men, too, sometimes seek out extreme environments in response to psychic wounds, in life as well as in literature. But for them, the wound is optional; men are free to undertake an adventure without needing trauma (or anything else) to legitimize it. By contrast, a woman’s decision to detach herself from conventional society always requires justification. Women can, of course, go out exploring for pleasure or work or intellectual curiosity or the good of humanity or just for the hell of it — but we can’t count to ten before someone asks if we miss our family, or accuses us of abandoning our domestic obligations. 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.” 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.” Perhaps this evasiveness is why the walking cure proves such a peculiarly British solace. So many of our most loved writers have been trampers who trudged off misery, from Austen, whose heroines are similarly inclined, to Wordsworth, whom the literary critic Thomas De Quincey estimated walked 180,000 miles in his 80 years (an average of six and a half miles a day starting at the age of five), and whose work is rich in trekking.For many of the walkers—residential school survivors, victims of domestic violence—that is critical advice. Feel the pain, understand it, then let it go. My demons are much less fierce. Yet, despite the strongest conviction that long walks could help me rekindle a sense of purpose, I had abandoned a pair of previous multi-day hikes (I called for a ride not a dozen kilometres from the family cottage in Muskoka), and the failure lingered. Heeding Vollant’s wisdom, I painstakingly deconstruct the mistakes I made: poor planning, new boots, heavy loads. I mentally scan my aches (post-op right knee fine, left knee sore). Then I will my attention to the rolling road ahead. 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. 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 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.

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.

Maria Bonaparte, unpublished diary. In: Feder S. Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis. New Haven: Yale University Press; 2004. 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.” 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.” No, really: Every day. Rain or shine, snow or sleet. Whether waking up at home or in a hotel room on the business-traveling road. The everyday-ness of it matters.

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