Why a Daily Walk is the Simplest Act of Self-Care in Lockdown
Walking in Manhattan is never just about getting from A to B. It’s also a form of self-expression and self-preservation. To escape home, no matter how tony your address, is to seek time and space for you to be you, whether you’re John Travolta strutting to the Bee Gees in Bay Ridge or Dustin Hoffman slamming the hood of a cab that dared to get in his way on Sixth Avenue. “Hey! I’m walking here!” is every frustrated New Yorker’s cri de coeur, a curse as much as it is an affirmation.
Long before we all took to roaming the streets six feet apart, walking was my personal Wellbutrin. I’ve been self--medicating this way since I was in third form at St. Paul’s, a boarding school set amid the woods of New Hampshire. Where Travolta’s soundtrack was “Stayin’ Alive,” back then mine would have been Robert Frost.
My English teacher during that first year away from home was a kind, charming, vaguely elfin man named Philip Burnham. In class he was fond of having us recite Frost’s “Dust of Snow.” Decades later, whenever I wander through a grove of pine trees in the winter, it is Mr. Burnham’s voice I hear: “The way a crow/Shook down on me/The dust of snow/From a hemlock tree/Has given my heart/A change of mood/And saved some part/Of a day I had rued.”
A few years after my wife Honor and I got married, we settled on the Upper East Side, just a few blocks from the Central Park Reservoir and not too far from where a field hospital opened to treat the overflow of coronavirus patients from Mount Sinai Hospital.
In better times, when the sun was out early, we would take walks together around 6 a.m., while our children slept. Work and the demands of raising two delightful yet emotionally bespoke children meant there was less time for Honor and me to be alone, and these strolls became a combination morning admin and mini-date.
All that changed with the Great Reset. Shortly after the outbreak, we made the decision to head to the country. Still, we kept our daily pilgrimage. Even with all the restrictions placed on normal life, walking remains a viable, even fundamental, salve for our mental health, what New York governor Andrew Cuomo might call a “positive intervention.”
Cuomo goes running with his daughter Cara Kennedy-Cuomo; we now bring our kids for a sort of family outing–meets–-nature studies class. It’s Dad School after Distance Learning. We lace up our Bean boots, fill rucksacks with binoculars and some Audubon Society Field Guides, and channel our inner Thoreaus.
A few weeks in, they are still city mice finding their way in the country, but at least they can identify a cardinal in flight and Orion’s Belt in the heavens. Miracu-lously, no one has slammed a hand on a log blocking our path through the marsh grass and announced, “Hey! I’m walking here!”
They have plenty of time for that once we’re back home.
This story appears in the Summer 2020 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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