As someone who takes a walk almost every day, I’m no stranger to its fitness benefits and other positive attributes. I love this quote about walking by the writer, Kenneth Grahame, 1959-1932, who’s perhaps best known for his classic children’s book, The Wind in the Willows. Clearly, Grahame relished being outside in the elements and appreciated the importance of his daily constitutional. Thought I’d share his words here to remind us all to get up from our desks, take a breather and put the day into wider perspective.
Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking — a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree — is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and supra-sensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you whilst you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth that is pushing life firth of every sort under your feet or spell-bound in a death-like winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation. Time enough, later, for that…; here and now, the mind has shaken off its harness, is snorting and kicking up heels like a colt in a meadow.
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