One of my favorite novels, Jane Eyre, begins with one of my favorite opening lines:
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
A bit further down the page, you learn that ten-year-old Jane is “glad of it.”
It’s a great opening line because it marks the transformation Jane will undergo by the time she’s a young woman, for whom taking walks–whether pacing the hallway, posting a letter in the village, or fleeing illicit and/or ill-advised betrothals–has become a way of life. In fact, walking is one of the ways she’s able to exercise any freedom or agency at all within her constrained life.
This spring, finding myself too-often and too-easily hunched over a screen, I’ve been trying to take daily walks. Sometimes I have a few (slightly misquoted) lines from Wordsworth ambling through my head (“Up, up my friend, and clear your looks, or surely you’ll grow double!”), and I almost always find that Wordsworth is right. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever taken a walk that made anything worse, and a good many have made things better. Of course, Wordsworth was worried about people getting too caught up in their books; one wonders what he would think of our screens.
Wordsworth and his Romantic compatriots were on to something. I doubt it’s a coincidence that they too were in the middle of technological revolution and its consequential cultural upheaval. As we grow more and more constrained by technologies that seduce us with certain freedoms while furtively depriving us of others, we would do well to follow Jane’s example and look for whatever little opportunities there might be for a walk each day–that humble exercise of body, mind, and human freedom.
