Walking about your city can make you 'happy, hopeful and healthy'

Walking is a favoured method of getting about the city.

Cycling is next and when time or distance precludes those options, driving is the next choice.

Tony Taylor's,
"Fishing the
River of Life".

Public transport, buses, need to be in the mix, but sadly it seems to be too infrequent and always appears to be not where I am or going where it is I want to go.

Research illustrates that for public transport to be truly effective, read useful; it needs to be effectively going “past your door” every seven minutes.

Our future will be decidedly different from what we know today and those three transport methods – walking, cycling and public transport – will become elementary.

They are, it has been said, society’s “silver bullet” as walking and cycling are both inevitably about exercise rescuing us from host of health difficulties and public transport, just like walking and cycling, will be our fundamental method of movement as the world really begins to scrabble for energy.

After 200 000 years of evolution, walking is still fundamental to our lives and our reactions have evolved in accord with that pace to ensure that a collision between walkers is a rare as snow in the Goulburn Valley.

Beyond ensuring that we can walk collision free, evolution has shaped our mental capabilities to coherently absorb what is happening around us we walk, or even at a steady cycling pace.

Driving determines that your attention be on the task at hand, or it should, and so the intricate and intimate realities of your community become a blur as you speed by; at least speed in terms of your cognitive ability to take note of what is in your field of vision, as limited as it is.

So, if you care about your community walk, explore the streets to which you have never been, look at the buildings, check out the signs, be curious, wonder why certain things are or are not happening, pick up some rubbish, encounter a stranger and talk with them, spend a few minutes talking with a friend and embed yourself in your community.

Coincidently as these thoughts were taking shape a friend lent me a book written by a 80-year-old allegedly about fishing, which it obliquely was, but in reality it was mediation about life and in which the author, Tony Taylor, thought about the five things he could pass onto his eight-year-old grandson; things that a person could do every day to make to make them healthy, hopeful and happy.

Taylor said people should develop friendships; be physically active; foster curiosity about the world; continue education throughout their life and finally, do not think about money all the time, rather offer help and services to all.

“These five things”, he wrote, “maintain good mental health”.