In Praise of Walking and 52 Ways To Walk

The importance of core control

In Praise of Walking by Shane O’Mara, 52 Ways To Walk by Annabel Streets and Howard Jacobson’s The Dog’s Last Walk. Can you spot a theme here? Okay, the last is a joke but it was on my reading pile and I’d been enthusiastic about walking five or six kilometres a day again and wanted to reinforce my intent with some scientific facts about the physical and mental benefits of regular walking. The first two books offer ample evidence that if those benefits could be put in a pill some drug corporation would be making billions out of it.

Then after a variety of circumstances, I was hit by severe vertigo, (Glad to see ‘benign’ at the start of the doctor’s diagnosis though – can’t imagine how awful this would be if it were chronic!) Benign or not, it put paid to my resolution to walk. As for cycling and tangoing, they were like a distant dream. How glad I was though of my years of tango practice. The Argentine tango is based on intense core control. When the vertigo struck and the world went topsy-turvy, it was instant and instinctive that I felt a steel-like column kick in within me. This meant that I might have been walking in the wrong direction, but my core held me upright when everything else preventing me from collapsing onto the ground had suddenly gone on holiday!

Who Killed JFK? and British Scandal

At first I couldn’t even read without nausea. Thank God for podcasts: Who Killed JFK? presented by Rob Reiner and Soledad O’Brien gripped my psyche while the world around me swirled. New evidence, new interviews – and Rob Reiner (director of my favourite, The Princess Bride, and When Harry met Sally) really knows how to tell a story. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Also I love British Scandal with Alice Levine and Matt Forde. They’ll never run out of topics. They cover the Post Office scandal, which now has a series based on it with Toby Jones, Mr Bates versus the Post Office. That’s where the warped values of our NeoLiberal society inevitably lead, beginning back in that Post Office era when the new technology, the computers’ mistakes were blamed wrongfully on human beings, with lives wrecked or lost, and ending up with the same result in our Robodebt scandal.

Then I graduated to Succession on my laptop. It’s as brilliant as everyone says. It’s the Shakespeare play for our time. In the future people will look back on our collapsed civilisation and understand from Succession why it foundered. The trenchant writing and psychological insights, the acting and suspense, the subtlety and high production values … it’s the best series I’ve seen since The Handmaid’s Tale.

And to balance the toxic family life and society Succession depicts so well, I then went downstairs to the TV for some mental balance (in the absence of my physical balance) in the form of an uplifting, funny family setting in the Norwegian Pørne, about a social worker with a complicated life. It’s on SBS On Demand and it will lighten your heart.

The vestibular system: ‘a miracle of micro-engineering’

After I stopped vomiting I could read again and return to the three books mentioned above. O’Mara deals with vertigo in his book. It’s in the ACT Library system on page 55-56 if you’re interested. He calls the vestibular system ‘a miracle of micro-engineering’ – I’ll quote a little about our inner ear:

Within the semicircular canals, little hairs protrude from the inner surface. They have small crystals at their tips and are attached to ‘stretch receptors’ at their base. The hairs move in a fluid. Think of them like tulip flowers at the end of a stalk, swaying in the wind. The minute tugs when they move change the shape of these receptors a little – just as the wind blowing the tulips will cause the roots to stretch in the soil. This stretching, in turn, causes a change in the receptors’ electrical state, and sends a signal to the brain via the vestibular nerve. It is a simple, reliable and robust way to convert a movement signal into an electrical signal.

The ostoliths, meanwhile, are fixed at right angles to each other, and are hive-like masses with hairs that are fixed in calcium crystals. These align with linear movement … The crystalline masses move when the head moves … And because the position of these always-on senses is fixed within the head, the brain has a constant reference signal provided by the semi-circular canals and the otoliths for the brain and body in three dimensions.

Who knew? O’Mara’s book covers everything you want to know about the wonders of the human body and walking plus some urban research topics like the ‘walkability index’ of cities. It’s readable and fascinating but the one I found most inspiring is Annabel Streets’ 52 Ways To Walk. Her style is fluently energetic,the book is crammed with wonderful examples of the miracle of our bodies when we walk. It’s also illustrated with charming drawings by the author. Her enthusiasm is infectious.

Noise

Because of the fragile state of my inner ear I was more sensitive to noise than ever before. When writing about walking in cities, Annabel Streets presents the evidence of the detrimental effects of noise: raised blood pressure, increased diabetes, obesity, heart attack, stress, inflamed blood vessels which raise the risk of stroke … it goes on. Children under flight paths do poorly compared with those living in quiet conditions. Okay that’s a link, not causation, but the University of Michigan has established that people in noisier environments had a 36% greater chance of developing Alzheimer’s.

‘Noise vibrates the tiny bones in our ears and morphs into electrical signals that pass to our brain, triggering our stress hormones, disrupting our pulse, heart rate and blood pressure, upsetting circadian rhythms.’

Research has been proving this for a long time. Twenty years ago I thought that around about now, noise would be the new smoking and there would be laws passed to limit the decibels we are exposed to. Not a bit of it. No one has done anything about this enormously detrimental problem and in that twenty years, in the last ten actually, Australians in particular have increasingly gone for diesel-guzzling, destructive, inefficient, enormous and enormously noisy four-wheel drives, so the problem is a lot worse than it was one or two decades ago.

Birdsong

Try to go for walks in quiet, natural places is Street’s advice. The British National Trust found that the sounds giving us greatest pleasure are birdsong, a running stream, rustling leaves, silence, twigs snapping underfoot, animal noises, wind whistling through the trees and rain falling on leaves.

Even short walks, she writes, are useful. A ten minute walk after each meal is more effective at lowering blood pressure than a single longer walk. Walking alone is good for reflection but walking with a group triggers ‘a cascade of feel-good chemicals’ in us that endure far longer than the duration of the walk and ‘good social ties mean better physical, mental and cognitive health, as well as longer life.’ (p. 208)

Rat and dog faeces in the lungs of passing pedestrians

Howard Jacobson’s The Dog’s Last Walk is an amusing book of essays, the title one a poignant observation of just that, inspiring memories of dogs in life and literature. Other essays deal wittily with a range of contemporary topics, like social media. He succinctly sums up the problem with it:

In the heat of violent exchange, everything but opinion gets lost. A generation has grown up that – online, at least – is deaf to tone, impervious to irony, incapable of grasping that thought can be tentative and argument exploratory. Theirs is a battleground of stated positions. One view lowers its head and charges its antlers at another. All we can hope is that in time they will have butted themselves into unconsciousness. (p. 285)

I’m with Jacobson, (and I think blogs are different – just digital essays, really) especially when I think about the maniplulation of voters by lies spread on Facebook and other social media and the detrimental effect on democracies everywhere. Social Media is the leaf blower of communications.

Leaf blower’ is a euphemism – the accurate term should be ‘Hand-held hurricane’ – precisely the force they generate, hence their effects, of dessicating earthworms, for instance, and spreading air-borne dog and rat faeces into the lungs of passing pedestrians and of course deafening anyone within a two or three kilometre radius.

The vertigo diminished until I only have about two per cent of it now. I lost about three weeks, in which noise, even someone talking loudly, felt like an assault on my inner ear’s tiny, fragile hairs and crystals. The whole experience intensified my awareness of how fragile life itself is.

The books on walking and Jaconbson’s amusing essays increased my appreciation of the simple joys of moving when the world isn’t spinning, of humour and of nature. Luckily, most of us can find places to walk that are away from the four-wheel drives and leaf-blowers. I’m back to tango (which, in fact, can be done with closed eyes) and increasing my walking. I haven’t climbed onto my bike again yet but I’m closer to doing a six kilometre walk every day I try. Just listen to Annabel Streets about walking amidst trees:

Trees have a poweful physiological and psychlogical effect on us. Terpines are potent phytoncides produced in the leaves, stems and roots of them and they act as anti-inflammatories, anti-depressants and reduce glucose and insulin levels in older people. Students who took a ten minute walk through trees before studying retained much more than students … [it] improves communication between neural pathways. … A 2010 study showed that those who walked over a mile a day went on to have the most robust memories in later life, cutting risk of memory loss in half.


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