As last week was somewhat hectic, in the deluge of news that followed, one probably escaped your attention with possibly devastating consequences for your health. Indeed, on October 8, the National Health Security Agency (ANSES) issued a recommendation of the utmost importance. To age well and avoid the pitfalls of a sedentary lifestyle, you need to get up from your chair every thirty minutes and walk for five minutes.
The report states that “walking five minutes every thirty minutes at low to moderate intensity improves metabolic parameters, such as blood sugar or insulin levels”. You have been warned. Not being a hypochondriac in any way, I still took care to set the alarm on my phone, which in exactly twelve minutes meant that I had to interrupt the writing of this paper to go galloping into the living room.
We will also remind dizzy minds that maintaining good health requires taking around 7,000 steps per day, enough to allow the body to regenerate and face the vicissitudes of everyday life with serenity. What I rigorously adhere to. Summer and winter alike, I walk alone in the streets of my city, a tireless pedestrian whose repeated passages in front of the local school do not fail to raise questions and concerns, without interrupting my daily wanderings. I would rather arouse opprobrium and face the constabulary than put my health at risk.
However, in this series of injunctions…
Sorry, the alarm sounded and I jumped out of my chair as if it were threatening to swallow me up. Watch in hand, I rushed outside and ran into my neighbor who was also walking down the hallway as if nothing had happened. We passed each other without saying a word, but from the look we exchanged, we understood that we were on the same side, that of individuals who take government recommendations to heart. Health above all, our eyes said, in this poorly lit corridor where the intrusion of a third participant caused a monster pileup at apartment 206, while 204, alerted by all this noise, was leaving his apartment, in cycling shorts and dripping with sweat…
A healthy mind in a healthy body, they used to say. But who cares about the mind today? The body has invaded everything.
However, I said (the five minutes have passed, I’m in terrible shape!), in this series of injunctions, one major one is missing. Because if it is good to maintain oneself in order to endure, if it is to coexist with a mind stupid like a rusty chronometer, you might as well die straight away. No, the big thing forgotten in these health considerations is precisely the mind, as if the latter, to stay in shape, needed nothing except to remain in a vegetative state.
A healthy mind in a healthy body, they used to say. But who cares about the mind today? The body has invaded everything. Sports halls. The glorification of physical exercise. The pectorals exhibited as marks of virility. The concern to eat well. To move. To trudge. To pedal. To go after yourself. In good shape perhaps, but stupid as hell.
Would it be too much to ask of our government agencies to launch a major reading awareness campaign, insisting on the fact that reading thirty minutes a day gives meaning to life? Half an hour of daily reading is the assurance of understanding yourself better and therefore, of understanding others better. To find yourself again. To recharge your batteries. To learn. To escape from oneself. To open up to the world of knowledge and knowledge. To enrich oneself with other cultures. To truly be in the world.
Let’s go even further. With the advent of artificial intelligence, reading is becoming a vital issue for our own survival. In these times when, more and more, we let the machine think for us, if we do not take care of our mind, it will wither away. It will collapse under the weight of its own absence, its total and irreducible inconsistency. It will fade before it simply disappears.
(The alarm sounded. I went to pee, I don’t know if that counts towards the five minutes of obligatory walking, I’ll have to find out.)
Reading thirty minutes a day is guaranteed to keep your brain alert. Read anything and everything, but read. Read with the same intensity as you do push-ups or lift weights. Read to free your mind from ambient mediocrity. Read as if stupidity were a fatal disease, which it is, although unfortunately it is not. Read so you don’t see your neurons decrepit, your synapses stiffen.
It is not a question of opposing mental health in its broad sense to physical health, but one without the other is worthless. 7,000 steps per day + twenty pages per day, this should be our new mantra, the only one that corresponds to our essential needs. Reading is a physical activity like any other. It keeps the mind alive and strengthens its brain tone. It participates in our neuronal balance. It makes us alive like never before, alert, lively, quick to light our path towards our inner truth. Not to be subjected to this brainwashing orchestrated by the digital biggies to better sell us anything.
Read, but don’t forget the main thing: get up every thirty minutes and walk for five!
