The Case for the Early Walk

Long before the gymnasium and the fitness plan, before the tracked step and the measured mile, there was the walk. It is the oldest motion the body knows, the one it learns in the first years of life and keeps, if it is fortunate, until the last. To rise and go out on foot is to do something the species has done in every age and on every continent, a plain human act that asks for no invention. In a culture that tends to complicate the business of staying well, the walk endures as a quiet rebuke: the most natural exercise is also the most available, and it was here all along.

What recommends the walk above almost every other form of movement is its democracy. It requires no membership and charges no fee. It needs no equipment beyond a pair of shoes, and often not even those. It demands no skill that must be taught, no coach, no court, no season. The young walk and the old walk; the athlete walks and the person who has never thought of himself as athletic walks beside him at the same easy pace. There are few pursuits in modern life open to so nearly everyone, and fewer still that ask so little in order to give so much.

The morning walk holds a particular value, out of proportion to its modesty. Taken early, before the day has filled with its obligations, it becomes a kind of anchor, a fixed point around which the hours can arrange themselves. The early light does its own gentle work, and the simple fact of having gone out and returned lends the morning a settled shape. A person who has walked at dawn carries something of that steadiness into the crowded afternoon. The walk does not lengthen the day, but it does seem to widen it.

There is a long tradition, older than any of our theories about it, of thinking on foot. Philosophers have paced while they reasoned; writers have walked out the tangles of a sentence that would not come at the desk. The steady rhythm of the stride appears to loosen the mind, to let a thought turn over that had been held too tightly. Anyone who has left home puzzled by a problem and come back with the beginnings of an answer knows the pattern, even if he could not explain it. The body in gentle motion has always been good company for the working mind.

The great secret of the walk, if it has one, is that consistency matters far more than intensity. A modest walk taken every day will do more for a person, over the length of a year, than the occasional heroic march undertaken in a fit of resolve and then abandoned. Regular, unremarkable movement is among the most settled goods known to those who study how bodies keep their health, and the walk is its most faithful vehicle. The aim is not to arrive exhausted but to return most days, quietly, without ceremony, having simply gone.

There is, too, the walk taken in company. A stroll shared with a husband or wife, a child brought along, a neighbor met at the corner and kept for a block or two, turns exercise into something warmer than exercise. Conversation moves differently when two people walk side by side rather than sit across a table; it grows easier, less guarded, as though the shared direction takes the weight off the words. Families that walk together are doing more than keeping fit. They are making, without quite meaning to, a small daily occasion for one another's company.

For the reader who would build the habit, the counsel is gentle. Begin small, with a distance so short it feels almost too easy, and let the ease be the point. Fix the walk to something already reliable in the day, the first coffee, the return from work, so that it borrows the strength of an existing routine. Choose a route pleasant enough to want to repeat. Forgive the missed morning without abandoning the enterprise, for a habit survives its lapses if it is not asked to be perfect. The walk rewards the patient far more than the ambitious.

Finally, there is a modest civic virtue in the practice. To walk one's own street, slowly and often, is to be reacquainted with the place one actually lives, with the state of the sidewalks and the turning of the season and the faces of the people nearby. The driver passes through a neighborhood; the walker inhabits it. A person who goes out on foot each day comes to know his corner of the country in a way no screen can supply, and to be known there in turn. It is a small thing, this daily going out, and like most small things done faithfully, it quietly proves to be a large one.