Exercise is Good for You

‘Exercise is good for you.’ Open any newspaper or magazine at this time of year and you will read several articles promoting this message. Readers will be encouraged to exercise in order to lose weight, boost their physical fitness and also their mental health.
Have you thought about how exercise could benefit your writing, walking in particular? I thoroughly recommend walking for getting your mind going. Out in the cold damp winter air, with the wind in your face, sloshing through dewy grass in walking boots or wellies, you have time to think. Permission to think, even. What else you can do whilst looking across a muddy ploughed field in the middle of the countryside? Moreover, there is something about the steady rhythm of plonking down one foot after the other, which seems to generate and develop ideas in creative heads.
Swimming can work in the same way I know of several ACW members who explore and develop characters and plot lines in their minds as they pummel up and down the pool. Exercising in a gym, in front of a television or phone screen, doesn’t work like this, nor do exercise classes in which the instructor is barking out directions every few seconds. Walking is the best. (And walking is free. I’m reminding you of this before you feel guilted by one of those press articles to join a posh health club at vast expense.)
Walking is also a useful tool for deepening your grounding in Christ. For many centuries, Christians have made pilgrimages - to Walsingham, Canterbury or, in France and Spain, along the Camino de Santiago del Compostela - meditating on and learning about their faith alongside others. In the Bible, Jesus walked – a lot - mostly with His Disciples, teaching them His message as they trudged along, in Galilee and, later, between the towns and villages around Jerusalem, all stepping along the same uneven and stony path, up and down the same hills, feeling the same fierce sun. If only we could’ve walked with them!
Yet still, in the twenty-first century, we strive to walk with God in our writing. I believe we can achieve this better by doing some – real – walking.  

Rosemary Johnson writes flash and short stories, which have been published by CafeLit, Scribble, Mslexia, Friday Flash Fiction, Paragraph Planet and in other printed magazines and ezines.  Historical fiction is what she enjoys writing most.   Her novel, Wodka, or Tea with Milk, set during the time of the Solidarity trade union period in Poland in 1980-1, is published by The Conrad Press.  A collection of Rosemary’s short stories, Past and Present, will be published by Bridge House Publishing in summer 2025.