Extracts from My Walk Log

August 27, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Daily walk, en route to the March for Life at the Minnesota Capitol building, during a major snowstorm—which made me a human interest story worthy of the newspaper. Photo Credit: Leila Navidi, Star Tribune.

When I was thirty-five I finally realized that I needed to walk at least an hour a day in order not to feel like crap. Unfortunately, this means that for most of the preceding three and a half decades I did feel like crap, because I figured that feeling like crap was what life felt like. My usual response to an acute case of crappiness was to take a nap, as I assumed that to be the cure, even though I would often wake up feeling worse, almost drugged, and have a thick head for the rest of the day.

Somehow or other during our time in France, when habitually over the course of the day I would walk an hour in all to get to and from work and then to and from Zeke’s school, I gradually came to realize that I didn’t feel crappy on those days. At which point the penny dropped: on the days I didn’t walk at all I went back to feeling crappy again. So pretty much ever since I’ve walked every day…

Barefootery

June 1, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In recognition of National Go Barefoot Day, here’s my testimony to having my own two feet planted firmly on the ground!

First things first: our culture is really weird about shoelessness. I would say it’s the last taboo, but there are, thank God, a few more left in place. Let’s say it’s the last taboo of zero moral significance. Americans, and probably North Atlantic/Westerners generally, equate shoes with civilization. To have no shoes is to be poor, destitute, uneducated, probably stupid, and maybe pregnant. Twice I believe myself to have been mistaken for a prostitute, once in the U.S. and once in Germany, because, despite my definitely not sexy attire, I was out in public shoeless…

There We Walked

October 4, 2017 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

October 31 of this year marks the five hundredth anniversary of Luther’s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses. It marks a more modest anniversary for me as well: the seventh anniversary of the conclusion of the long walk Andrew and I took in Luther’s footsteps. The idea germinated back in grad school, when one day it dawned on my hiker husband that the great reformer himself had once been a hiker, too. Friars on pilgrimage to Rome were expected to go on foot the whole way (a ferry crossing was apparently the one allowable exception). Luther must’ve been a lot tougher than the portly portraits of his later years suggest...