WALKING

WALKING

Walking is the simple act of advancing by lifting one foot past the other alternately without running. So simple and so easy it is to do almost automatically or unconsciously, yet, it is one of the best ways to exercise to activate the muscles, the nerves and the blood circulation.

People who are almost always inside their cars are experiencing more pains and discomforts than those walking regularly. Pains and discomforts that are often too troublesome to bring the person to a doctor for check-up or to a hospital for confinement.

Generally neglected, walking is the easiest and the cheapest pathway to a better health especially for a senior citizen who cannot avail of more expensive if not more strenuous forms of exercise.

However, walking on an ordinary busy street nowadays is an extremely challenging act. Because there are so many moving vehicles and people as well, you try to walk on the very side of the road at the supposed "bangketa". Then you disgustingly discover so many irregularly parked trucks, cars, tricycles and motorcycles here and there plus other moving vendors' carts. You try to zigzag your way out just to meet frontally a bicycle-riding boy who is looking everywhere except where he is leading, which happens to be you.

Simple walking is no longer that simple. It becomes a very risky hobby that could bring about big accident or even death as it happens not very seldom. Walking has always been my hobby since childhood. My hobby that once brought me up to the high part of Mt. Banahaw where a wooden cross is planted. Same hobby that also brought me to a dead end of a lost street somewhere in Nigeria, Africa where the primitives were doing a kind of cooking ritual that I felt if I did not have a chance to get out I could have been one ingredient of one special recipe.