STORY: Johnny, The Walker by George Will

Story title: Johnny, The Walker
by: George Will

  Let us consider the virtues of walking. It is wine of life, good for body and soul, as many well-known people agree.
    Samuel Johnson walked 52 kilometers of muddy road out of Birmingham, England, every day. The philosopher Immanuel Kant walked so regularly through town that the shopkeepers set their clocks by
his passing. Wordsworth's strolls through England's Lake Country made literary history. Charles Dickens walked around London by day and by night. His novels captured life as seen at a walker's pace. Religious writer C.S.Lewis took daily walks to be able to see and hear and smell and touch the beauties of Nature, which are, he says, "a secret which God shares with us humans alone."
    Someone has said that walking is the most civilized and most civilizing exercise because it leads us to think and to muse. Jetting across a nation in a couple of hours gives us only a bird's eye view of things. Only walkers take in the country at an appropriate speed.