I am an avid subscriber of many travel vlogs on streaming platforms which take the viewer on a walking tour of selected cities in Europe and Asia, providing you with a vicarious experience that leaves you with a sense of being actually there. My favorite is “Booking Hunter” because of the diverse walkable European cities featured on its channel.

It makes me furiously envious because those cities are very walker-friendly! 

The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that emptied our roads and streets offered a unique glimpse into a possible carless future. I thought that was an opportunity to re-think the way we move around our cities. This means choosing to prioritize public transport, walking, cycling, carpooling or ride sharing, and using cars only when it’s really essential.

But I was wrong. In the post-pandemic, we’re back to our pre-pandemic ways. Same, same. The heavy traffic of previous years is back with a vengeance. Our streets are over-filled once again with vehicles, joined by the ubiquitous motorcycles, and even e-trikes.

I am a walk-a-holic. Although we have a family car, I use it only when I go on errands with my wife because she has trouble with her arthritic knees.  If I go alone to an appointment, I prefer not to use the car, or park it in a mall nearby and use public transport to get to my destination. I prefer to walk than drive.

I highly recommend that you insert some walking into your daily commute, build it into your daily activity. Start small, such as light walking for short distances.

Let’s talk about the health benefits of walking, which you probably know already. Medical researchers have validated a number of clear health benefits to walking for seniors Did you know that walking 25 minutes a day can up to seven years to your lifespan? That’s according to a 2015 study at St. George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in London.

Walking may be the best form of physical exercise for older adults because it’s easy to get started with, it can be done at low or moderate intensity It helps lubricate knee and hip joints and strengthens the surrounding muscles, reducing the strain placed on the joint itself. A new United States research has found that increasing the number of steps you walk each day could lower your blood pressure.

What I dig about walking is that it makes me feel the ground beneath my feet. I like standing and walking on solid ground. It helps me stay grounded, physically and metaphorically.

I like the phrase “being grounded.” To me the phrase describes a person who is sensible and has a good understanding of what is really important in life. To be grounded is the ability to maintain balance, stability, and presence of mind, no matter what is happening around you, and despite all the fame and praise.

Walking reminds me about the need to be humble. The root word of humble after all is humus, Latin for ground. When I walk, I walk with the so-called humble masses, the hoi polloi. I sweat in the heat of walking under the sun like them. I can smell the mingling of various scents. I see all kinds of faces. I imagine each individual walking as people with their own burdens.

This is why walking should be practiced by people in public service. It is one way of getting a reality check on life as experienced by the people they are supposed to serve.  It is also the kind of daily serum that should be injected into individuals who have risen to a higher social and economic level so they would never forget who they once were and where they came from. I know a lot highly successful people, some of them my acquaintances who would rather erase the memories of their humble roots, because they are ashamed to be found out. You would never catch them walking on the streets or taking a public ride.

But there is another stimulating reason why I love to walk. It helps me think creatively. It triggers the flow of creative juices.

 “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Thus “sprach” Friedrich Nietzsche. And he is certainly not the only genius to associate walking with creative inspiration. Nikola Tesla took long daily walks in a city park and claimed to have formed his ideas fully in his mind during these strolls before committing anything to paper. Steve Jobs insisted on “walking meetings” with business associates at Apple, especially when creative problem solving was required, something that Mark Zuckerberg and many others in Silicon Valley now emulate. Dozens of famous authors — Henry David Thoreau, L.M. Montgomery, J.K. Rowling, and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few — have said that walking is the only reliable cure to writer’s block.

Science has confirmed that walking does indeed awaken creative ability. In one Stanford University study, researchers found that walking boosts creative output by 60 percent.

It could be, then, that walking, with its continuous involvement of left and right sides of the body as we shift from one foot to the next with each step, accommodates greater communication between the two hemispheres of the brain in the process of coordinating those movements. It’s as if when we walk, the two halves of our brains are having a conversation.

Where we walk matters as well. I vary the places where I walk. Sometimes in the back alleys of Binondo where you see interesting eateries and mercantile shops. I used to navigate the narrow passageways of Quiapo where I  sourced my pirated DVDs in another lifetime. It’s there in Hidalgo Street where I spotted the decaying remnants of the ancestral homes of the elite during the Spanish colonial period. Quiapo was once a rustic place where the aristocrats of Intramuros built their vacation houses.

Sometimes I amble and saunter through the hallways of an air-conditioned mall, just aimlessly looking and sniffing around.  A walk through the metro provides immediate stimulation—a greater variety of sensations for the mind to play with. But it can be over stimulating, with all the pedestrians, cars, and billboards that zap and drain our attention. 

A small but growing collection of studies suggests that spending time in green spaces—gardens, parks, forests—can rejuvenate the mind much better than city streets because a garden or a park allows our mind to drift casually from one sensory experience to another, from cascading water to rustling grasses and leaves, fluttering butterflies, the panoramic display of colorful flowers and so on.

Why can’t Metro Manila have car-less, walking zones or bubbles? Our cities do not encourage people, much less old folks, to walk more because our society has that motor vehicle-first attitude.

When will we have leaders with an enlightened vision of making our cities more walk-attractive? To all urban designers and planners, is it possible to connect neighborhoods and buildings and create more walkable neighborhoods so that in the next pandemic (God forbid), we can ride a bicycle or walk to hospitals and public places without worrying about transportation? Let’s make walking a cool thing to do. Seriously.

We Filipinos must reclaim our ability, even our right, to walk. Let’s have cities where people walk as a matter of habit and lifestyle and commuting in ways familiar to residents of London or Paris or Tokyo.

Let’s redesign our city landscapes that would support the walker and not the car. Let’s do away with the car culture we revere and reclaim our walking culture. I look to the day when we can wake up and step outside and go somewhere or nowhere without getting behind the wheel of a car. Where the streets are so pedestrian friendly that walking on the street will not be a struggle or a risk.

As someone says, “There is nothing more human, more natural, more fundamental to our freedom, than transporting ourselves by foot. Nothing more purely instinctive than a child answering the desire of feet, legs, spine, and head, to dart forward in the direction his brain urges him to go.”

Featured image: Street scene in Binondo District (by Take Me Tour)