Perfect reading for the day before I participate in “Walk with a Doc“in Superior, CO.
I have always been a passionate fan of walking. I advise my patients to walk – this is an activity that they can do well into their nineties, without any special equipment required. If walking sounds too pedestrian :-), use the term flaneur!
Kagge talks about the shortness of life in this very powerful, 5 minute video:
He has done an interview about his book with my favorite podcaster here.
Some excerpts from the book:
- In Sanskrit, one of the world’s oldest languages, originating from India, the past tense is designated as the word gata, “that which we have walked,” and the future is anāgata, “that which we have not yet walked.
- Time passes more quickly when I increase the speed of travel. And it isn’t only time that grows smaller as one’s pace increases. Your sense of space does too. Life is prolonged when you walk. Walking expands time rather than collapses it.
- Humans should, as the philosopher maintains, be willing to burden themselves in order to be free. If you always choose the path of least resistance, the alternative that offers the fewest challenges will always take priority. Your choices will be predetermined and you will not only live un-freely, but also lead a dull life.
- High speed is a menace to my memory, because memory depends on time and spatial awareness, both of which are truncated within the confines of a fast-moving vehicle.
- I was curious and asked Magdi Yacoub what he had learned from studying thousands of beating human hearts. Yacoub replied, without much ado: “Go for a walk every day.” Hippocrates, already had a grasp of this truth 2,400 years ago. He warned against being incorrectly medicated and emphasized that no medication could have such a broad effect as simply putting one foot in front of the other. “Walking is man’s best medicine.” Walking has played a much more meaningful role in human health than all of the medicines that have been consumed throughout history.
- Solvitur ambulando: “It is solved by walking.”
- “If you are in a bad mood, go for a walk,” was Hippocrates’ advice. And if you are still in a bad mood: “Go for another walk.”
- To take walks in fair weather alone—remaining indoors during wind, rain or snow—is to forgo half of the experience. Maybe even the better half.
- To take a walk through nature, and find a quiet place to lie down when I am tired—this is one of the most delightful things one can experience.
- I walk away from my problems. Not all of them, but as many as possible. Don’t we all? Some of my problems fade away as I walk. They might vanish within an hour, or a few days. Perhaps they weren’t as big as I had imagined? It’s often like that.
- Most of the people I know who struggle with big personal problems are those who don’t take walks.
- In school, I learned that the spiritual was the opposite of the material, but in the woods these two are not opposites—they are equals. To walk reflects this.
- Homo sapiens didn’t invent bipedalism. It was the other way around. The ability to walk, to put one foot in front of the other, invented us.