Walking | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 7, 1878

Walking.

WALKING briskly, with an exciting object of pleasant interest ahead, is the most healthful of all forms of exercise except that of encouragingly remunerative, steady labor in the open air; and yet multitudes in the city, whose health urgently requires exercise, seldom walk when they can ride, if the distance is a mile or more. It is worse in the country, especially with the well-to-do; a horse or carriage must be brought to the door even if less distances have to be passed. Under the conditions first named, walking is a bliss; it gives animation to the mind, it vivifies the circulation, it paints the cheeks and sparkles the eye, and wakes up the whole being, physical, mental and moral.

We know a family of children in this city who, from the age of seven, had to walk nearly two miles to school, winter and summer; weather sleet, or storm, or rain, or burning sun, they made it an ambition never to stay away from school on account of the weather, and never to be “late;” and one of them was heard to boast that in seven years it had never been necessary for him to give an “excuse” for being one minute behind time, even although in winter it was necessary to dress by gaslight. They did not average two days’ sickness in a year, and later they thought nothing of walking twelve miles at a time in the Swiss mountains. Some times they would be caught in drenching rains and wet to the skin; on such occasions they made it a point to do one thing—let it rain, and trudged on more vigorously until every thread was dry before they reached home.

There is no unmedicinal remedy known to men of more value in the prevention of consumption than a few miles’ joyous walking: let one follow it up a week—a walk of two or three miles in the forenoon, as much in the afternoon—and, except in rare cases, when a longer continuance may be made, the result will be triumphant; and yet nine persons out of ten would rather give a dollar a bottle for some nauseous drops or poisonous pills than take the trouble to put in practice the natural remedy of walking. Nor is there any anodyne among all the drugs in the world which is the hundredth part so efficacious, in securing refreshing, healthful, delicious, glorious sleep, as a judicious walk.—Hall’s Journal of Health.