The Therapeutic Benefits of a Walk

Imagine that we’ve been in the apartment by ourselves since the previous evening, and now, at the start of the weekend, it’s eleven in the morning. A succession of small bits of bad news has come in over the past twenty-four hours. Someone’s unhappy with our performance at work; a customer has complained about our attention to detail; we have a traffic fine to pay; the milk has gone off; a friend is accusing us of not caring enough about them – and then, the final straw: someone we very much hoped to see for dinner has cancelled abruptly, with an unconvincing excuse about their mother.

We try to keep the different strands separate, but eventually, in the stillness of the small living room, they coalesce into an overwhelming impression: we’re not very worthy, there’s something wrong with us, we’re ugly inside and out, we’ve been like this since the start, no one likes us, we’re going to die alone – unhappy and mediocre.

The impression is stronger than we are. We curl into a ball and can’t hold back a tear, which rolls onto and is absorbed by the grey-green sofa. Ten minutes pass, then another twenty.

Finally, we can’t take it any longer. We have to pull ourselves out of the spin. With a newfound urgency, we grab our jacket, run downstairs – and head for the nearby park.

This expanse of green was laid out by a group of enlightened planners and municipal engineers a few generations ago. There’s an inner and an outer circle, a small fountain, a playground and a statue of a man who pioneered research into bees. More importantly, the park has very little idea of us. It hasn’t heard of our place of employment; it doesn’t have any views on our romantic life; it couldn’t care less whether we are alive or dead – and this ignorance, far from crushing us further, has an immediately soothing effect.

A grand oak tree, which has been sitting patiently in this spot for at least a hundred and fifty years, has priorities blessedly far from our own: it’s pulling nutrients from the soil, showing its freshest new leaves to the sun, providing a nesting place for robins and an athletic park for grey squirrels. The indifference is not nature’s alone. There’s a person in scrubs on a break from the nearby hospital, sitting on a bench with a flask of tea. They might later be fixing catheters on the children’s ward or ministering to a dying nonagenarian. To their left, a little boy is playing tag with his father. His joyful screams are unabashed; it’s a game, but something very serious – about love and self-esteem and having a home – is being exercised. Overhead, planes – perhaps heading back from Singapore or Madrid – are locking onto the final approach beacons at the airport to the west. In the distance, a line of uncomplaining pylons is bringing in electricity from the coast to power hairdryers and video games: our strange, extraordinary, bathetic species, in all its glory, complexity and mundanity.

With all this in view, it suddenly seems not to matter quite so much that we may – or may not – be a wretch; that a lover has let us down (heaven knows they might have their reasons, and we aren’t perfect either); or that we should, in all fairness, probably make more of an effort with our career. The individual ego diminishes; we let ourselves dissolve into a wider realm. What happens to us no longer has to be the measure of everything. We are – in part – also the trees, the houses, the clouds overhead, the pigeon who has come to peck at a leftover sandwich and the young boy now being hugged tightly by his dad. Our ultimate fate ceases to concern us so tightly. What does it matter quite so much what we’re worth or where we end up? We rejoin the ocean from which we had been in frightened exile for too long.

None of the elements that have helped us to recover our balance care to articulate a theory of existence; yet they may have one nevertheless. The oak tree has its own distinctive silent take on love, achievement, success and power – as do the clouds, the robins, the squirrels and the contrails. Each one of them is whispering, very quietly indeed: matter less, forget more, open your heart, let go of your resentments, surrender.

We can be so much happier when we manage – for a time – to still the clamour of the ‘I’ and live less intimately with ourselves; when we stop insisting that everything that happens to us must say something profound about us; when we can wear our fate more lightly. We may end up alone, we may be foolish, we may be sad. None of it, the park tells us, might matter too much anyway.

We’ll cope after all. Perhaps we’ll go to the cinema alone tonight. Or have a drink on the terrace. We haven’t just taken a walk; we’ve had a covert philosophy lesson.