Lucy Wyndham Read 16 Minute Walking Workout
When you read while you wander, your destination may be a surprise.
In the desert West, behavior that might elsewhere be considered inexplicable, idiosyncratic, and fifty-fifty indefensible is tolerated—sometimes even encouraged. Only as my ten-year-old daughter, Hannah, becomes more concerned about what is normal and more worried about whether our family qualifies for that distinction, she barrages me with unanswerable questions.
Why practise I right baseball radio announcers who can't hear me and tell chicken-crossing-the-road jokes to our hens? Why do I use fishing poles to fly kites? Why accept I nicknamed my concatenation saw (Landshark) and my Weedwacker (Cujo)? And why, of form, do I so oft article of clothing no pants? Sometimes I wish my child would ask most something simple, like mortality, God, or where babies come from.
Recently, Hannah asked, "Dad, why practise you read while you walk?"
Every yr, I hike about ane,300 miles effectually these desert wilds outside Reno, and I probably read my way through 800 of them. I became a bibliopedestrian then long ago that I've forgotten why I do information technology. But in search of an honest answer for Hannah, I've been excavating those reasons.
For starters, walking and reading are like in many ways. Both are forms of practice, one working out the body; the other, the listen. Both are excellent when pursued in solitude. Each gets united states from i place to another, and nonetheless the main purpose is ever the journey rather than the destination. They enlarge our sense of the globe, expanding the territory and helping the states to place ourselves inside it. A practiced book, like a practiced hike, takes us away from home and into a series of surprises that ultimately gives the concept of home its meaning.
Reading and walking accept another thing in common: Although most of u.s. know how to practise both of them, nosotros seldom seem to practise either. As Mark Twain put information technology, "The man who does not read has no advantage over the human being who cannot read." Might nosotros say the same almost a person who has healthy legs but refuses to walk?
While Karl Marx made some perceptive pronouncements about the value of books, information technology was the wiser Marx, Groucho, who observed that "exterior of a domestic dog, a book is a man's all-time friend. Inside of a dog, it's too night to read." A book, like a canis familiaris, is practiced company, and I just don't cotton to heading out on a hike without taking both along with me. I also like the contrasts a advisedly chosen book can create with the mural through which I move. There'due south goose egg similar being on the river with Twain or at bounding main with Melville or by the pond with Thoreau while I'grand shuffling through the sagebrush and alkali dust. When it gets hot, I dear Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams or Rick Bass'southward Wintertime. When it gets cold and windy, I go to the Hawaiian Islands in the poetry of W. S. Merwin.
Fifty-fifty John Muir, who is surely amid the virtually celebrated of walkers, packed books on the trail. Muir was besides familiar with the "book of nature," a trope known to many cultures, both aboriginal and modernistic. Liber naturae, the volume of nature, is the idea that the natural globe is a course of sacred text and that the revelation of its pregnant depends upon our willingness to read it carefully. Seen in this low-cal, the world of the book and the book of the globe are intimately related.
Of course, I'thousand no Muir, and I'thousand more than Groucho than Karl. And this is a wide-open desert with a thousand hazards. It is true that I have on a number of occasions read myself into problem while on the hoof—stepping onto harvester ant mounds or into ground squirrel tunnels or invading the infinite of Swell Basin rattlers. But most of the surprises that come from simultaneous reading and hiking are proficient ones because looking from the world to the page and back once again becomes a game of peekaboo: At present you don't see information technology, now you practice. Ane afternoon, I looked upwardly from a book to see a pronghorn buck chiseled against a rocky ridgeline above me. That evening, equally it became too night to meet the page, I lifted my head to witness the thinnest possible crescent moon, in close conjunction with Venus, floating above the summit ridge of my abode mountain.
When we read a travel guidebook while walking in a metropolis, or a natural history field guide in a forest, we are considered normal. It is understood that we demand the volume to recognize and name the things of this world and to prevent ourselves from condign lost within information technology. Equally I explained to Hannah, practiced writing plays the same orienting role: Information technology can assist us discover where we are and reveal why our connections to each other and to the world we walk through every twenty-four hours are so precious in the outset place.
Though Hannah insists that I'1000 "totally non like other dads," she seemed convinced by my reasoning. "Yes, Dad, I tin see that," she said. "At present, what about that no-pants thing?"
Copyright © 2014 past High State News (December 9, 2013), hcn.org.
Source: https://www.rd.com/article/reading-while-walking/
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