Shall We Walk?
see an old woman with her bundle of knickknacks, and you wonder how many grandchildren will shout
This essay was written during the Japanese Occupation but it is as relevant today as it was then.
I wrote an article some years ago on the benefits of walking. My automobiled friends praised the
article politely enough, they liked it (at least they said so); the points were well taken; people should really
walk more; it took someone like me to show in such graphic terms what could have been clear to everyone
before… then they went on their morning-till-night automobile rides, increasing the size of their paunches
and the number of their chins and illnesses…
I must state, however, that I didn’t start to sell the idea that walking is the panacea of all earthy ills,
not that one should walk from here to Tarlac if there is not truck available, not that rain or shine, in sickness or in
health one should walk or else. But I did set out to claim that if milady has to give up once in a while her
tricyle or carromata ride, she will be one none the worse for the little exercise she gives her limbs.
Walking keeps the form fit. It obviates bay windows, inelegant in men, unsightly in women.
Walking puts into play painlessly and unconsciously, important body muscles. The leg muscles, obviously,
are the ones mostly affected. But when the legs move they pull at the abdominal muscles, giving them the
needed exercise which prevents their getting flabby and the abdomen’s becoming big and pendulous. The
static muscles of the back, especially those around the spine, are put into movement, too, and this is
essential in the maintenance of good posture. The arms also swing into motion as a natural
accompaniment of walking.
There are all manners of walking. The ambling walking of the absorbed lovers, while satisfactory
from the point of views of giving opportunity for sentimental discourse, is not so from the point of view
of exercise. From the latter viewpoint, a brisk morning walk is the thing. You need not even plan it as a
formal program. It is a relatively simple thing to walk to the office, or if that is too much because where
you work is quite distant from your home, walk part of the way. Either choice you take, however, makes it
worthwhile by deriving from it the exercise you need. Walk vigorously and enthusiastically. You can almost
actually feel the blood circulating in your body with a briskness equal to the vim and zest you put into your
walking.
Some enthusiasts have it that a good habitual walker is also a good habitual thinker. Perhaps the
situation is a bit far-fetched considered as direct cause and effect. Clean thinking may come as a result of
good blood-circulation an general body health, to which may have contributed the exercise derived from
walking improves the eyesight. Although when the walks are done out in the country, where a person has
to look far into the distance most of the time, at hill-peaks and tree-tops or upon green grass across the
brooks, the far sight focusing affords rest and is good for the eyes.
Walk and be healthy. Walk and save money. Why be a slave of His Excellency, the cochero, when
it is only a matter of a ten or a fifteen minute walk? Walk, instead, and see the city sights at close range.
Many things of varied interest will attract you. Show-windows will engross you if you are an addicted
window-shopper. Perhaps you intend to buy a pair of shoes next pay-day. Or a vest, or a barong tagalog
for a friend or hubby, a bag for little Wifie. Window-shopping now will help you later.
If you don’t care particularly to shop merely with your eyes, if window-shopping only gives you
pain and longings you never hope to see fulfilled, there are other things besides windows to make a walk
interesting. People, for instance. What a motley crowd of interesting human beings a short walk can afford
you. You see all types, dressly tops with their uselessness written all over their persons, worried looking
fathers of families, frowsy dames with eyes that tell stories of hopes and frustration, eager youths and
pretty girls flirting with each other openly or subtly, but always charmingly, because they are young. You
for joy on her arrival. There is a vicious-looking beggar whom you evade, because he appears more as
your-life-or your –money type than a bona fide pauper who needs your help. A loud-mouthed woman,
with the market brand stamped on her face and bearing, is haggling over the price of a ride with an equally
tough cochero. Words are exchange, voices become excited and shrill, but you are already out of hearing
distance. All your interest is now taken up by an old couple, worn-out and thin to emaciating, but still with
the light of love and adventure in their eyes. You see the man gallantly giving his arms to his wife as they
staggeringly cross the street. You wipe the mist in your eyes, and it is good that you do so in time or you
would not see two little children, their attention centered upon some candy displayed on a counter near the
sidewalk, coming plump into your path. You step aside, watch the eager hungriness of their look.
Maybe such city sights fatigue you as they do some people who prefer using a walk for
meditation purposes; then take to the wide open spaces. Don’t protest too soon…. You need not leave the
city nor your job; you can simply take a little time to get out of the streetcar lines and busy-streets, and
seek the fields or the less trodden path of so called civilized life. Walk and think, allowing Nature to soothe
your bruised spirit. Let the swaying grass teach you the beautiful lesson of resilience, of bending to the
inevitable, the wind of circumstance. Let the flower teach you the essential perpetuity of life, and the bird,
the joy of existence. The tree, symbol of dignity and serenity, indifference and aloofness, is to make you
see, with a sense of balance, trivialities for what they are; the little lakes, sometimes mere puddles, full of
tadpoles and fishes and insects, to show you that life sprouts anywhere, that your own, for all its seeming
importance to you, cannot mean so very much in the big scheme of living.
Perhaps you have a problem. Some would-be advisers walk it. Walk it and see it from different
angles. Walk it and see it for the first time against the background of the whole universe. And while
walking, says an expert on the subject, “think tall, pull your chin up and throw your chest forward no
matter how heavy a burden you carry on your shoulder.”
With your sense of proportion restored by quiet deliberation and by the palpable sympathy of
Nature all around you, you strike at one solution, then another. Your judgment, made clear by the
classmates brought about by your walk and your surroundings, becomes sound and wise. You reach a
decision, and it is generally good.
Walk and know yourself. You will be surprised to find out what an enjoyable companion you can
be to yourself. Don’t be like the man who gets so bored being left alone with his thoughts that he has to
have a book with him all the time he is not with people. Books have their place, too and an important
place it is, but so have walking and getting acquainted with yourself. Just thresh out the little doubts you
have regarding this and that, mull over remarks made by your friends or office mates, study the
personalities you have come across during the day. It’s fascinating pastime. And all this while you are
taking your constitutional walk.
Shall we walk this once then, Milady?
Pura Santillan-Castrence

The writer begins the essay with a casual tone and continues with a descriptive manner
of enumerating the unmatched benefits of walking. She uses words that bring out a visual image in the reader’s mind
which adds to the beauty of the development of the scenes. It may sound like the essay is for those health concerned readers.
However, if you read on, you will discover the purpose for writing the essay.
Walking may be extremely ordinary but the essay places a very purposeful essence to it. It brings the readers to the
advantages of walking to health, to what one sees while walking, to the lessons one learns, and to the discovery of oneself. Imagine,
all these are possible when one walks.
I hope that each one will be attached to the essay and see a bigger truth about life.

Short biography of the author:

Pura Santillan-Castrence was born on March 24, 1905, Manila was a Filipino writer and diplomat. Of
Filipino women writers, she was among the first to gain prominence writing in the English language. She
was named a Chevalier de Légion d'honneur by the French government.

Her literary career began in the 1920s and she soon was recognized as among the leading Filipino essayists
of the 20th century. Many of her essays were featured in Philippine Prose and Poetry a widely studied high-
school textbook which she had authored. She also was a columnist with the Manila Daily Bulletin, and
contributed essays and articles in many other national publications.
She joined the foreign service as the Chief of the Translation Section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. After the war, she held various positions within the
Department of Foreign Affairs. In 1959, she was designated to the Philippine embassy at Bonn, then the
capital of West Germany.
In 1964, Santillan-Castrence was appointed the DFA Assistant Secretary for Cultural Affairs, with rank of
Ambassador, by President Diosdado Macapagal. She remained in that post through the first term of
President Ferdinand Marcos, and until her retirement.
In her retirement, she became a permanent resident of the United States where she taught in several
colleges.
Later she moved to Melbourne, Australia to be with a daughter who was an Australian citizen. At age 94,
she still wrote regularly for the Bayanihan News and the Manila Mail, publications which catered to
Filipino expatriates even if she was already legally blind. She dictated her columns, which proved to be
popular. She wrote critically against the Iraq War and on the ties between the United States of America
and President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. At age 100, she published a compilation of these articles in a
book entitled As I See It: Filipinos and the Philippines.
Santillan-Castrence died aged 101 in January 2007, just one month before she was slated to receive a
lifetime achievement award from the National Commission on Culture and the Arts. She was one of few
Filipino centenarians to have become famous in her own right.