A Little Walk a Day Will Do a Lot of Good

Our temple recently honored a congregant who just turned 95. It's hard to imagine Hilde is that old because she moves so beautifully, has a mind as sharp as a tack, and is active in many shul affairs.

Aside from a cheerful personality, Hilde doubtless has good genes. But I don't think it hurt that she spent her childhood outside Heidelburg. My parents had several friends when I was growing up who were German-Jewish refugees, and each one was sturdier than the next. Not only were they witty and worldly, they actually seemed predisposed to a love of hiking and walking.

I can picture those German-Jewish families before the war, taking to the hills on a Sunday, walking sticks in hand. It seems a romantic image now for our generation. We prefer taking our exercise at the gym. Yet I wonder if something is lost in translation, spending our time in a windowless room moving our bodies on metal machines rather than out in the open air. It's something my husband and I perpetually disagree on.

He conscientiously goes to our local gym four or five times a week. Yet I have to plead to get him to take a walk in our neighborhood. I am inclined to weave my need for movement in and out of the parts of my day, rather than go from long periods of being sedentary to short bursts of strenuous workout.

I was lucky to have lived across from a park when I grew up in the Bronx. Many evenings, especially warm ones, found the older men and women of the neighborhood walking its considerable length from the swings at one end, past the hill and rock formations, to the handball courts out back. Some couples made a loop around the outside of the park. Some just strolled through our building's courtyard.

An Endangered Activity
In Yiddish, there are two designations of the English verb "to walk." If you walk from one place to another, that's gayen, or "to go." But if you take a walk for the enjoyment of the walk itself, then it's called shpatzirn and the walk itself is a shpatzir.

In our current, bustling world, the first kind of walking is definitely on the wane. We tend to get from one place to another not so much by foot these days as by automobile. Shpatzirn still has its followers. But I worry that, like reading, it might become an endangered activity.

As we head to various doctors with our midlife complaints, who among us has not heard the question, "Do you exercise?" I often wonder what they're getting at. Do they really want to know if I have a cordial relationship with my body, and let it stretch and bend when it needs to? Are they pushing for progressive mind-body synchronicity? Or is it simply to gage that, given the current sedentary lifestyle, I'm jumping around enough to offset any prevalent couch-potato tendencies?

When our younger daughter entered middle school, her biggest complaint was not the increased workload. It was the end of regular recess. I knew what she meant: all that mental concentration and no chance in the day to run it off. If it were up to me, I'd push every office to allow several daily recess periods. All staff would be encouraged to take a walk, stretch and roll around on mats, and play various indoor and outdoor games.

But until that time, I suppose we'll have to take our movement where we can get it.

Any activity that gets us out of our chairs is a good thing. All power to those of us who play tennis, swim laps, take yoga or ride bikes.

But at the end of the day, it's always good to walk comfortably out into our natural world, moving at a pace we can think in. Those older folks from my neighborhood had the right idea. They managed to get fresh air, company and a chance to stretch their legs all in one. Wherever I might end up as the years pass on, I hope there will always be several good paths -- and partners -- for my daily shpatzir.

Mara Sokolsky is a freelance writer living in Providence, R.I. E-mail her with any comments at: sokolskaya@cox.net.