Analogously, one can look around and see how there’s a whole lot of work we need to do in the world—starting with ourselves and our families—and that prayer can initially seem like something that takes time away from the more important action. The work: DeLana works independently on several fronts — including a book on this exact aspect of her OS — while simultaneously remaining as fully jobbed-up as ever. While I was writing the book, I found myself thinking of my granny quite often,” she says. “All the things she would say – ‘Go for a walk and take a few deep breaths and then you’ll feel calmer’ – that sort of thing. I thought it was just my granny being whimsical. But it turns out that she was right all along.”

Wild succeeded in part because it channels so many of our oldest and most broadly shared stories. Strayed is an orphan cast out into the world; she is a bootstrapper lifting herself out of poverty; she is a pilgrim walking to salvation; she is even a pioneer, going West to grow up with the country. But her book’s deepest power might come from a different and even more time-honored journey: that of a daughter becoming a mother — in this case, implicitly, to us all. The journey Strayed recounts in Wild culminates when she learns to love herself as her mother no longer can. And that kind of love — extravagant, unwavering, undiminishable — is what she offers to her readers, and urges us to find in ourselves. THE WALKING CURE Reader's Digest Canada | April 2020 How a daily stroll improves your mental health, boosts your social life and cuts your risk of chronic disease - Christina Frangou I agree with Jesuit Scholastic Michael Rossmann that walking is good for body and soul. My cardiologist told me to do some walking daily to keep my heart working better. At 81 its difficult for me to walk much but I walk as much as I can with help from my “third leg” – my cane! As a kid all I did was walk, and also in my early later years. Once on one of my sidewalk walks I spotted a newly hatched but unfortunately dead baby bird fallen from its nest, which I removed preventing people from stepping on it and I place the little creature on the soil near shrubbery. Sidewalk conversations happen easily and can sometimes become reciprocal learning moments, uplifting and underlined with smiles. And it’s true as Mr. Rossmann said, as one walks one can “smell the roses” that is, become aware of lots of beauty often missed.Wild is not a book of advice, but it was received in much this same spirit. Its readership has surpassed not only that of her last book but that of books, period — “All these people who don’t even read have read Wild,” Strayed says — and fans show up at her events in a fervor to meet her. “I never imagined Wild would be read as inspirational,” Strayed says — never mind that her writing had been described as such for two years before the memoir came out. “But it’s the No. 1 thing people say to me now: ‘I was so inspired by your book.’”

Many have written about the details of the encounter. Mahler had been working on his never completed 10th symphony and had become greatly distressed that his wife, Alma, was having an affair with architect Walter Gropius (whom Alma would go on to marry 4 years after Mahler’s death). Freud made several interpretations that astounded Mahler, including surmising the name of Mahler’s mother and identifying a “mother fixation,” suggesting that Mahler was “seeking his mother in every woman.” 1 This analysis gave Mahler some relief and helped him to connect 2 childhood memories: a scene of conflict between his parents and hearing a folk-song played on a hurdy-gurdy in the street. Freud later recalled, “Mahler thought from this moment on, deep tragedy and superficial entertainment were tied together indissolubly in his soul and that one mood was inevitably tied to the other.” 2 Your toboggan is an important symbol!” thunders Vollant, a preacher on the pulpit. He wants the walkers to stop asking logisticians to shuttle their sleds. “Your ancestors pulled 200 pounds in their toboggans. Without them, they would have died. Even if you only carry your water bottle in your sled, take it! We are proud people. We don’t want snowmobilers passing by and saying, ‘Look at those Indians. They’re letting machines do their work.’” Unintended (and most important) consequence of the walk, #2: “I’m not sure I like these words particularly, but the walk has become a sort of ‘radical act of self-care.’ The thing about setting aside an hour, for yourself, outside (or sitting with a cup of tea if that’s your thing), is that it creates space for ideas, hard subjects, feelings, all to reside and exist and rumble. Life is brilliant, and messy, and joyous, and sometimes I go for a walk and I feel like I just finished it in about 30 seconds because my brain is lit up with, just, joy. Not always, but more often than I’d ever have imagined.” Perhaps walking provides a mental salve because one is actually doing something, even if this is as simple as putting one foot in front of the other. One has the impression of moving forward because one is literally moving forward. Almost every day since, she has gone for a walk—and the habit has changed her life. Not only did she quit smoking, but her resting heart rate dropped from 80 beats per minute to 60. The ritual has given her a lot more, as well: stress relief, mental-health management, community.

Walking will also help you think; the test of a new idea is to take it outdoors. Desk-bound study is mostly reflecting on others’ reflections. Seated meditation may produce blinding insight for the individual, but usually nothing new for humanity. Gros says walking outdoors yields the greatest intellectual treasures — bodily action combining thoughts, feelings, memories and impressions into original, new ideas. Cheryl Strayed touches a slate-gray band on her wrist. “My Fitbit,” she says. “We’re going to get our 10,000 steps.” Strayed and I are heading out for a stroll in Portland, Oregon, in the kind of weather for which that city is famous: not raining, but not not-raining, and certainly not ­certainly-not-going-to-rain. Strayed is undeterred, either because she’s lived here for nearly two decades, or because she once walked for 94 days in every conceivable meteorological condition, or because she really wants those 10,000 steps. She is wearing jeans and hiking boots — the lightweight kind that work for bumming around a city, or anyway around this city — and no coat, and the Fitbit. Not the least charm of this pure blank movement, this “gress” or “gression,” was its aptness to receive, with or without the approval of the subject, in all their integrity the faint inscriptions of the outer world. Exempt from destination, it had not to shun the unforeseen nor turn aside from the agreeable odds and ends of vaudeville that are liable to crop up. [13] No, really: Every day. Rain or shine, snow or sleet. Whether waking up at home or in a hotel room on the business-traveling road. The everyday-ness of it matters.

Doctor: I was tired of running. And I had that hope against hope. And I had to try. If they were to return here…to their work. They might end all this…even after all this time. I think of the “canners” —men and women who walk the streets all day, collecting discarded cans and bottles. At the end of a long day they walk bent over under a huge bag of containers, worth a few dollars at the few places that will redeem them. These are their wages, and they’ll have to walk still farther to collect them. Which makes her: Technically, a “side soloist,” one of the 13.4 million soloists who hold full-time jobs while pursuing indie work on the side. I wonder if sometimes it’s about perception,” she says, about walking alone. “At home we know all the horror stories and all their locations, but when we’re elsewhere we don’t have that knowledge. We don’t know about the horrible things, so we think we’re safe. And nine times out of 10 we are. We look at women in the past who’ve done big journeys and think they’re intrepid or brave, but they also didn’t have daily news stories about what could go wrong.”

The anthropologist Tim Ingold proposes a gressive ontology that distinguishes wayfaring from navigation. Wayfaring is an autotelic way of being in a mesh-worked world of lines in which cognition is distributed palpably over the body. In navigation, by contrast, passages are transitions merely between nodes of a fixed teleological network, where the human is reduced to a passenger, sedentary even at the controls of the capsule, the path he or she follows a mere relay between stations. The wayfarer travels not across a territory but along it, part of the world’s restless coming into being: And then there’s the sheer mileage, at speed. Is this a workout? Not so much. “It’s a very different thing. Though, honestly, it took me an entire year initially to get over myself, because I had that sort of hangover like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me, I mean you’re an athlete and here you are at age 54 and what do you mean you’re going for a walk… .’ But it’s a creative, meditative act, rather than a what’s-my-heart-rate kind of thing.”

Now, in this transmission from Jenner, we see why he was so excited about the French’s progress. Jenner says he’s viewed the French scientists’ data and that he “likes their approach.” What follows is a lot of heavy jargon that includes concepts like: “activating systems to work against reanimation,” “jumpstarting circulatory systems,” and “short-circuiting the brain” to deal with “variant cohorts.” Is that a tombstone that looks like a tree?” Strayed asks. It is: In the southeast corner of the cemetery, not far off the path, there’s a headstone designed to resemble a stump, made more convincing by the layer of moss growing over it. “It’s kind of spooky, isn’t it?” Strayed asks. “It reminds me of The Wizard of Oz when the trees come to life.” We try to make out the inscription. “Here rests a woodsman of the world,” Strayed reads aloud. Martin Hansen, born 1861, died we can’t quite tell, 19-something. Only the first few words of the lines below are legible: A precious … A voice … A place … The bored person wanders around the house, wondering what to do. The walker, setting out, has nothing to do but walk; put one foot in front of the other, repeat and repeat. The eyes no longer wonder or wander, they focus on the path. Just by stepping out of the house and beginning to move, the walker has gone from aimlessness to purposeful activity. We have been at this for two weeks now, and every morning still brings a new series of challenges. At one stop, a wet, weary evening when the temptation to huddle in my sleeping bag with a book grows strong, I find myself at the woodpile amid a ring of shining headlamps, where Super Alexandra shows me how to rotate a log to find the grain and strike hard with a heavy axe blade at a slight angle. I misfire a few times, then find the sweet spot and start splitting rounds with one swing. “You,” she says, “would make a good Indian.” I’m obsessed with it,” she says of this last item. “I was so glad when you said you wanted to walk.” (I had proposed a hike, for obvious reasons, but even for Strayed, the weather forecast was a bit bleak for that.) “My favorite thing to do when I get together with my girlfriends is to go for a walk. I’m always like, ‘Can we go for a walk, can we go for a walk?’ and they’re like, ‘Let’s get a drink.’ I love to drink, don’t get me wrong, but I want to walk.”

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Strayed came to this body of work late — after she wrote Wild — and she does not identify with it. “It’s this educated white guy who spends a lot of time roaming around his properties,” she says, “plus usually a pretty intellectual, dry way of writing about the natural world. And we very seldom hear anything about the interior life.”