Walking

Kevin MacNeil and Denise Burnham

“Some do not walk at all,” lamented Henry David Thoreau in a justly celebrated essay on the topic. Thoreau understood that casual walking brings many benefits, not the least of which are spiritual. And practicing this “noble art,” often for hours at a stretch, is the means by which he preserved his “health and spirits.”

I first learned to walk deliberately by observing my parents, who are daily devotees of the art. Walking for exercise, yes. But, more importantly, for companionship. For their evening walks afford them opportunities to share concerns, raise difficulties, solve problems, catch up on family news, or simply saunter through the worldly events of the day. By this means they greet each sunset relaxed in mind, restored in body, and renewed in spirit. And they enter their eighties healthier than many who are demonstrably younger.

While Thoreau’s leisure is not given to most of us, an hour a day can be enough to achieve these benefits. When the weather cooperates, Denise and I walk a fixed three-mile circuit around the town of Culver, following the contours of the terrain as we survey the ups and downs of the day now coming to a close. Like Thoreau and his companions, we thereby “take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of [the] more ancient and honorable class” of Walkers.