HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2010-11-25, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2010. PAGE 5.
“I f you think North Americans are a
vigorous people…just watch the
natives in the business centre of any
United States town. They’d rather park
illegally, pay a fine or go to jail than leave
their cars two blocks away and walk to their
destination.”
– Armando Pires
Do you ever get depressed? Angry? Tired?
Confused? Then throw your hat in the air and
your meds out the window because scientists
at Essex University in the U.K. have identified
a simple physiological cure that they claim
dramatically reduces anger, confusion, fatigue
and depression in humans.
That’s the good news. The better news is, it’s
universally accessible, easy to master, non-
addictive, safe when taken as directed and
cheap as borscht.
They call it walking.
Really. A team of Essex University
researchers tracked a study group of 1,252
walkers (various ages, men and women,
dispositions ranging from happy to gloomy).
The assignment was a simple one: get off your
duff and go for a walk. Every day. In natural
surroundings – in a park, along a river bank –
through a forest if it was handy.
The results were gob-smacking. Seventy-
nine per cent of the participants reported
feeling more ‘centred’; 86 per cent said they
were less tense and 92 per cent claimed they
felt ‘happier’ – even after a short walk.
That was the biggest surprise. These
walkers didn’t traverse the Scottish Highlands
or rappel down a cliff face in Wales. They went
for short, gentle strolls well away from the
bright lights. Researchers found that peoples’
mood, self-esteem and overall mental health
showed an improvement after just five minutes
of simply walking in the woods. The most
profoundly affected? Young people and folks
with mental health issues – but absolutely
everybody got a buzz.
The Japanese have recognized this
phenomenon for some time. Living in one of
the most paved-over, built-up and altogether
urbanized nations in the world has perhaps
made them appreciate their precious green
spaces more than Canadians.
That’s why so many Japanese have taken up
the practice of shinrin-ryoho. Literally, it
means forest therapy.
In fact, it means going for a walk in the
bush. According to a report in the Globe and
Mail, there are 40 official forest therapy sites
in Japan. They plan to increase that to over 100
in the next decade. Citizens are encouraged to
come with their families or alone and immerse
themselves for a few minutes – or hours – by
going for a walk in surroundings
conspicuously lacking sidewalks, roadways,
vehicular traffic, concrete, neon or seething
throngs of harassed humanity feverishly
waiting for the lights to change.
The researchers at Essex University
basically discovered what is old news to the
Japanese.
North America, please copy.
We don’t walk much on this continent. Even
the urban Japanese average 7,168 steps a day.
Adults in Western Australia are the world
champs. They take an average of 9,695 steps a
day. Americans limp in at a little better than
half that – 5,117 steps per Yank, per day.
Canucks aren’t exactly marathon class
either. A study published in Health Reports
shows that 41 per cent of us – nearly 11
million sluggos – admit to walking less than a
half hour per week to get to school or work or
do errands. That goes a long way towards
explaining why the same study shows that one
in three Canucks over the age of 20 is
clinically overweight.
Thirty-three per cent of us. Check out the
folks standing (more likely sitting) on either
side of you. If they’re both skinny – then it’s
you.
The beauty of the walking cure is – it’s
cheap and simple. You don’t have to get a
doctor’s certificate, join a health club or buy
expensive gear. Just pull on a pair of sneakers
and start putting one foot in front of the other.
It’s never too late – but a word of warning:
results can be unexpected.
Take my uncle Vernon. Big smoker. Heavy
drinker. Seriously overweight. On his 61st
birthday he made a resolution to do something
about it. He started out walking just one mile a
day.
That was just three weeks ago. Now we
don’t know where the hell he is.
Arthur
Black
Other Views C’mon Canada – do the locomotion
When members of the general public
hear stories of great survival in the
world, the pre-packaged response is
that they could never do it. People say they
would never be able to do this to survive, that
they would never be able to do that to save a
loved one. The truth of the matter is that we’ll
never know, unless thrust into the situation.
Few movies touch me to such an extent that
I feel the need to write about them, but that’s
just how I felt after walking out of 127 Hours
over the weekend, the true story of American
mountain climber Aron Ralston’s five days of
having his arm pinned by a boulder while
climbing in Utah.
The movie details how Ralston’s arm lost all
circulation and technically died, while he was
forced to survive on little food, eventually
resorting to drinking his own urine to stay
alive. He even reached a point where he carved
the date of his death in the rock beside him, as
he was sure he had reached the end of his life.
Just sitting at my computer writing this, the
thought of breaking my forearm, tearing
through muscles and cutting through tendons
with a dull knife seems just as impossible and
outlandish as it does to you as you read the
newspaper in your home, but when faced with
the alternative, Ralston summoned inner
strength that few have ever known.
While trapped, Ralston has flashbacks and
hallucinations, as you might when put in a
situation such as he was in.
He revisits regrets, like not telling anyone
where he was, not answering his mother’s
phone call on his way out the door and
girlfriends he had lost over the years.
However, it’s when death becomes a reality
and he thinks ahead to things he’ll never get to
do that his urge to survive, by any means
necessary, can be felt.
It’s when Ralston realizes that he’ll never see
his parents again and that he won’t fulfill his
promise to play piano at his sister’s wedding
that he feels the aggressive urge to survive.
He thinks about playing with a son he hasn’t
fathered yet, with a wife he hasn’t met, and it’s
then that he knows he wants to survive so
much, that he’ll do anything he needs to do.
We can say that there’s no way we’d be able
to do such a thing, but when such an act is
standing between you and freedom and the life
you’ve always wanted to live, there’s no telling
what you’re capable of.
So after going through the unthinkable pain
of breaking two bones in his arm, cutting
through soft tissue, tearing through muscles
and enduring the blinding pain of slicing
through a tendon, Ralston was released, feeling
his back hit a rock wall. And despite all the
physical pain he had endured, it was with that
sensation on his back that he knew he was free.
He was free to be at his sister’s wedding and
play piano again and eventually, his vision
became a reality, as he met his wife and then
became a father to a son named Leo, so named,
Ralston says, because before he was even born,
he was “a courageous little lion” whose future
existence drew him through his darkest hours
in the canyon.
While he was named “Person of the Year” in
Vanity Fair and GQ magazines, it was what he
had yet to accomplish that was his greatest
motivation to survive.
Ralston says that when he had completely
severed his arm, and he realized he was free,
that it was the greatest moment of his life.
That’s amazing to comprehend, but given what
he has now had the chance to become and
achieve, after refusing to give in to death, it
really isn’t that outlandish.
Pushed to the limit
Atrickle has started of MPPs who say
they will not run again for the
legislature in the October 2011
election, but it could turn into a flood.
The exodus will be mainly because the
Liberals, who have held a majority of seats
since 2003, have plunged dramatically in
polls, including one that suggests 76 per cent
of voters want a change of government.
These are odds that will discourage some
particularly long-serving Liberal MPPs, even
ministers, from wanting to stay, watching
opponents passing legislation they disagree
with, endlessly asking questions that rarely get
answered and with less pay and perqs.
Only two MPPs have said publicly they will
not run again. Steve Peters, the legislature’s
Speaker, whose main job is presiding over its
unruly sittings, said after 11 years in the
legislature it is time he changed his career.
Peters is felt by all parties to have treated
them fairly, which not all previous Speakers
have done, and probably is leaving mainly
because he has lost some faith in his own.
Before a majority of MPPs chose him to be
Speaker, he was a cabinet minister in two
portfolios, but was dropped by Premier Dalton
McGuinty for reasons not apparent to
outsiders.
If McGuinty wins, the less likely scenario,
there is no reason to think he would reinstate
Peters in cabinet, and, if McGuinty loses,
Peters would face four years in the mostly
thankless role of opposition backbencher.
Neither prospect is enticing for an MPP who
twice ran major ministries, once ran the
operations of the legislature and was host to
every head of state who visited the province.
The other who has said he is leaving is
Progressive Conservative Gerry Martiniuk,
MPP for Cambridge since 1995, a lawyer, less
known because he worked mainly pushing for
benefits for his riding, including a school of
architecture and more doctors, which can be a
valuable role.
He said that at 73 he wants to spend more
time with his family and had an interesting exit
line, that governing parties, including his own
under under premier Mike Harris, often
prevented their MPPs from voting according
to their conscience.
MPPs have to be wary of leaving believing
their party will not win an election and the
Liberals are the best examples.
Before the 1985 election, when the
Conservatives had been in government four
decades and most felt they would win again,
Liberal MPPs Sheila Copps, Albert Roy, Don
Boudria and Eric Cunningham switched to run
federally, where Liberals had more more
chance of getting in cabinet.
All were competent and ambitious and
would have been assured of senior cabinet
posts if they had stayed provincially and the
provincial Liberals were elected.
Copps and Boudria won federally and had
notable careers in Ottawa, but Roy and
Cunningham lost and their careers were over.
In Ontario, the durable Conservative
premier William Davis meanwhile retired and
was succeeded by the less popular Fank
Miller, who was ousted by the Liberals under
David Peterson and the Liberals who switched
federally and lost were left wishing they had
stayed.
Today’s Conservative MPPs are more likely
to run again in the 2011 election, because the
polls suggest they have better prospects of
winning and getting cabinet posts and the
power that goes with them.
Are today’s Liberals running scared? New
Democratic Party house leader Peter Kormos,
who was an MPP when the governments of
Liberal Peterson and NDPer Bob Rae fell, told
the legislature “the signs are clear. When you
walk past the Liberal caucus room, you can
smell the fear,” he said.
“You see the Liberal backbenchers in their
seats and you can see the anxiety and
apprehension,” he said. “You go to the shelf in
the library on résumé preparation and there’s
not a single book in its place. They’ve all been
taken out.”
The New Democrat is not exactly non-
partisan and inclined to be melodramatic, but
some Liberals will be expressing their views
with their feet.
Eric
Dowd
From
Queen’s Park
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
MPPs quitting before vote
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The time to relax is when you don’t have
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– Sydney J. Harris
Final Thought