The Body and the World

Yesterday I wanted to write about walking and exercise, but I wasn’t ready to put it into words.  I find walks wonderful and magical, but that’s pretty vague.  I’ve been under the weather lately and not getting as much exercise as usual.  Without my usual exercise, my days can be too long, my mood less peaceful.

Yesterday, I joined a group at my gym called Citi-walk.  It was the first time for this group, so there were five of us starting in the lobby of the gym.  We took the stairs down to the sidewalk below and walked on Michigan Street towards Memorial Hospital.  We entered a building across the street from the hospital called Skywalk.  We took the stairs to the third floor, to the actual skywalk. We crossed Michigan Street looking down at the cars driving beneath us.  Then we walked through a few hospital hallways, down a stairwell, and came out in a different building.  It took me a minute to get back my sense of direction.  We continued walking through some neighborhoods around the hospital and almost exactly an hour after we left the gym, we returned.

I have spent weeks hiking in Spain, and it is indeed a profound way to tour another country.  Hiking the streets of South Bend is ordinary in comparison, but still, it makes me happy.  Rebecca Solnit says, “Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world” (Wanderlust: A History of Walking).  “Knowing the world through the body,” is a helpful explalnation.  Is there anything we do without the body?  But walking and exercise deepen the connection between world and body.  That’s a rich reward.

That’s mostly what I wanted to say yesterday.  Then, between then and now, a celebration in Boston, of the “engagement of the body and the mind with the world,” was attacked.  It adds an insurmountable layer to these reflections.