#197 / The Walking Cure

I headed off on my recent trip to Ireland and France with a bad backache, caused by a mere one day experiment with a new "tempur-pedic" mattress. This mention of the brand name does not constitute an endorsement! That mattress no longer is found in my home.

Rest and relaxation (if you call long plane trips either one of those things) didn't seem to fix the problem, which spiraled into something akin to total paralysis. Drugs, helpfully provided by my wife, actually did seem to do some good, but the picture illustrates what finally cured me. 

This is a little country path near Montmiral, the small French village where my sister Nancy and her husband Rick hang out, running a bed and breakfast with printmaking studio attached. It's called Maison Conti. This mention most emphatically does constitute an endorsement! Click the link and you'll see that anything less than a four-star endorsement would be unfair. 

"Walking" seemed to be the right cure for what ailed me. I have heard about the "talking cure," of course, in which merely talking about a problem makes it disappear. Talking about how my back felt didn't do anything, but "walking" did.

I remembered Tom Bates, the Mayor of Oakland, who scrapped his car, and began walking everywhere, with very good results. 

Getting out in the natural world (see illustration above), or even out into the world that we have created ourselves (Berkeley qualifies - and so does Santa Cruz), is a cure that will help us deal with a lot of our maladies, both collective and individual. That includes, as I've discovered, persistent back pain.

I think I'm going to be making greater use of that "walking cure." This does constitute an endorsement.

Photo Credit: Gary Patton