Walking For a Good Life
Did you know that walking, a simple and accessible activity, can significantly improve your mental and physical health? In our quest for a healthy lifestyle, we often overlook the simple in favor of the complex. However, maintaining a healthy body and fitness can open up opportunities, making daily tasks more accessible, attainable, and enjoyable. Walking, for example, can help reduce the risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure, and enhance mental clarity and mood.
What is a Good Life?
Most of us understand that being active is good for our health, and walking can help us achieve that goal. However, walking also provides us a path to living a good life. Unlike other forms of physical activity, walking offers a platform for acquiring knowledge, an avenue for creativity, a space for developing our emotional and social capacities, and a means to experience our need for achievement.
This view of living a good life is grounded in things that are good for us because they are intrinsically worthwhile. Walking offers an embodied basis for experiencing and engaging with the world in a way that helps us make sense of our surroundings. In walking, we combine our sensory, emotional, and physical capacities, allowing us to live a good life. The following are a few ways walking uniquely provides us with the capacity to enhance our overall well-being.
Knowledge
Walking allows us to process knowledge at a pace more conducive to understanding. One reason for this is that walking enables immersion: the speed of walking allows the pedestrian to digest more complex information about the time and space one is inhabiting.
Body Ballet
Walking is being aware of other pedestrians and objects. Walking enables a greater diversity of social interaction than different modes of transport. Moving on foot provides a broader range of opportunities for things or events in the flow of people’s movements. Some have suggested that walking can be described as a “body ballet,” in which integrated sets of embodied gestures, behaviors, and task-oriented actions combine into a movement that becomes a means of interpersonal and communal exchanges, actions, and meanings. While walking, we develop a sense of place. By moving, we strengthen our relationship with it and learn that social space is a rhythmically structured whole of synchronized time and space in everyday life routines.
Creativity
Walking creates an environment in which new ideas can form, allowing connections to be formed between bits of scattered knowledge. While walking, the eye and the ear focus more on our surroundings. The sensuous grasp upon such surroundings is extended and deepened and allows us to engage in the mental activity of organizing knowledge into hierarchical structures.
A Small Investment with a Big Payoff
Current physical activity guidelines suggest walking briskly for 30 minutes per day for five days can reduce the risk of several age-associated diseases. Additionally, low-intensity physical exercise, such as walking, exerts anti-aging effects and helps prevent age-related diseases, making it a powerful tool for promoting healthy aging. Incorporating walking into daily routines and encouraging walking-based physical activity interventions can effectively promote healthy aging and improve health outcomes in all populations.
Take a moment and reflect on how you can incorporate walking into your daily routine. Giving up something with less positive impact might be worthwhile to make room for this impactful activity.
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