Although experts dispute how much and what kind of exercise we’re supposed to have in order to live forever, I recently learned that the consensus is that walking isn’t enough. To live forever (or at least to the age of 100, which is a kind of forever), we need to get up off our bottoms and do the following: Rid ourselves of stress and anxiety, assume an easygoing personality, be an optimist, reside in the Midwest, avoid all food that doesn’t taste like cardboard, drink nothing but water, and (most important) get our hearts heavily pumping, our sweat seriously dripping, and our arms and legs flailing wildly, at least three times a week.
The thought occurred to me that maybe walking does more harm than good, since its very nature invites looking at the world, which in turn leads to ruminating on it, which rapidly evolves into philosophizing, which produces stress and anxiety. Darn. If Kant had only gone jogging instead of taking walks we might have been spared all the anxiety of modern philosophy.
In New York, where I live, I belong to a gym. Because it’s only a couple blocks away, it’s no big deal to drop in, do a hard workout, take a quick shower and be back home in just over an hour. Here in the small French village of Ménerbes, however, there’s no gym and I’m not working out at all. I’m walking. Not running. Not even walking very fast. I take a three-mile walk just about every day (sometimes, if the evening is particularly lovely, or I’m simply in need of getting out, I’ll repeat it). My walks are too brisk to invite reveries, but too slow to count as workouts. They’re just plain old walks.
I do a meandering loop that takes me from the center of the village to the countryside and back again, setting out on a narrow street that rapidly turns into a gravelly country chemin. I follow the road as it winds past vineyards and then through dry woods of scruffy cedars and random cherry trees. When the woods end, I stroll through open countryside dotted by old stone houses. The houses in Provence frequently sit close to the road, and generally speaking, the French don’t buy the idea that a home is something you show off to people who happen to pass by. The important parts are hidden — private gardens tucked away either in the back or else blocked from view by high walls or huge, well-trimmed hedges.
Walking here has taught me to do this utterly natural thing that you’d think I’d know how to do but had forgotten how to do — move along at a lively but leisurely pace with no purpose in mind other than to take a walk. My walks have led me to ponder the flowers, plants, bushes, trees, rocks, sky, earth, bugs, birds, cats and dogs (I have yet to see a cow, although I’ve seen horses) — and to realize, with a shudder, that for all our striving, we human beings can never really grasp our world.
On last night’s walk, I took a little notebook along, intent on recording some observations that I would then use this morning in order to describe my walk. But when I got up today and looked at what I’d written, I changed my mind. Gotthold Lessing was right — descriptions of beauty inevitably lean toward the boring.
Even so, I can’t resist ending with these two small observations: Trees are ferociously strong things — no way they’ll stop growing just because some huge rock happens to be in their way. And nothing on this earth breaks the heart more than the sound of songbirds at twilight.
