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The Lost Art of Walking
You might be surprised by what you've been missing.
Posted September 17, 2018
In a recent post (the-fear-being-alone), I addressed the fear of being alone and how we might begin to feel more comfortable in our own company. Let’s take that discussion further by looking at what to actually do in our aloneness. How might we restructure our habitual modes of being while alone in order to gain access to a richer existence? I will focus here on an ancient practice you can carry out in your aloneness that’s easy, free, and might be far more rewarding than you currently imagine. It may serve as a surprising antidote to loneliness as well. It’s called Walking.
I’m capitalizing Walking to distinguish it from walking as a mere means of getting from place to place or walking purely for the sake of exercise. True Walking is an intentional, contemplative practice that gives us access to a certain something, a something that great Walkers through Western history—including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson—have attempted to capture in their writings. Thoreau went so far as to claim that “every walk is a crusade” and added that “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.”
How many of us actually Walk?
The United States has become an increasingly sedentary society. Screen time, which is estimated to be over ten hours a day for the average citizen (American-screen-time), dominates our daily lives. Many of us have forgotten what other activities we might engage in if we’re not planted in front of the television, computer, or smartphone. Many of us feel disconnected from our bodies, disconnected from our self-generative imaginative capacities (due to the chronic bombardment of pre-fabricated imagery), and disconnected from the real. Walking, whether it’s a country ramble or an urban peregrination, presents us with a potential pathway toward reconnection.
How does Walking do this? Let’s turn to another great Walker, Virginia Woolf, to break this down a bit.
Walking helps us return to our senses. In 1927, Woolf wrote a beautiful essay called “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” in which she describes a walk on a winter evening through London in order to buy a pencil. The simple pursuit of a pencil becomes a grand adventure for her, though any observer of Woolf’s activities would simply see a woman taking a walk from her home to a store and back on a winter night. She heads out with the intention to keep her eyes open and describes how she progressively transforms into “a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.” She follows this with the exclamation: “How beautiful a street is in winter!” Walking with her senses alert and attuned to her environment allows her to experience the street in a more vivid and enchanted way. She continues:
"Passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidently but miraculously sprinkled with beauty, as if the tide of trade which deposits its burden so punctually and prosaically upon the shores of Oxford Street had this night cast up nothing but treasure."
Present to her surroundings while on her walk, she is profoundly affected by what her eyes, ears, nose, and skin are taking in. Her evening walk becomes an exercise in sensation and perception which enables her to enter more fully into the stream of life. Walking helps her wake up.
Walking returns her to her senses as well as stimulates her creative imagination. Woolf allows her mind to wander and to wonder during her walk while remaining sensually attuned to her environment. As she passes a store window, she imagines what her life might look like if she wore a particular strand of pearls displayed there:
"Let us choose these pearls… and then imagine how, if we put them on, life would be changed. It becomes instantly between two and three in the morning; the lamps are burning very white in the deserted streets of Mayfair. Only motor-cars are abroad at this hour, and one has a sense of emptiness, of airiness, of secluded gaiety. Wearing pearls, wearing silk, one steps out on to a balcony which overlooks the gardens of sleeping Mayfair…"
Woolf is able to step into other versions of herself and also wonder about the lives of the others she passes on the street and the goings-on behind the shutters of the houses she passes. She fantasizes about their lives and in so doing notes that “Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.” She loses the singularity of self as she walks along. She contains multitudes.
Walking fosters self-forgetfulness. As Woolf’s boundaries become more permeable to the outer world via the opening of her senses, her normally solid sense of self experiences a subtle but profound shift. She describes being able to temporarily “shed” herself while Walking. She contrasts this self-shedding with the self-solidifying experience of being inside the home, where one is “surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience.” Whereas while Walking, “We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house…we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers.” To temporarily shed the experience of being a unique and well-defined self and enter into a zone of anonymity – what a great relief that can be!
Walking fuels a return to the senses activates our imaginative capacities and helps us to forget ourselves. It also helps us access the real in an increasingly virtualized world. Taking a walk around the block helps us get to know the real neighborhood and our real neighbors – not only the humans but also the animals, trees, and buildings we live amongst and the living breathing landscapes in which we are embedded. Even if we never say hello to those we pass, being present to the human and non-human Others who live in our neighborhood can help us feel less alone. Regularly “shedding the self” and experiencing the permeability of our boundaries while Walking works to combat a sense of separateness. And it is precisely that sense of separateness that leads to feelings of loneliness and alienation in the first place.
Women and Walking
It’s important to mention the issue of gender here. Men have historically had greater access to Walking, whether through natural or urban landscapes, than women. Women Walkers have too often been associated with prostitution—“streetwalker,” “tramp”—or the assumption is that women are out walking simply to attract the attention of men. Women are historically associated with the home, while men are associated with public, cultural life. To be out Walking is to claim one’s right to take up public space and commune with the neighborhood on one’s own terms.
It’s important to understand the cultural history that disallows women from Walking and to walk despite, indeed because of, that knowledge. Walking is a political act. While there are obviously very real safety issues to consider when setting out on a walk, I nonetheless want to encourage women to claim their ramble. Even if you can’t physically walk for whatever reason (due to age, disability, injury, etc.) you can find a way to ramble. It’s all about the attitude. A proper ramble around the block in a wheelchair with your eyes wide open is worth far more than a lengthy walk taken in bad shoes without a stance of openness and curiosity.
So head out this afternoon. Head out as if you just arrived in your neighborhood for the first time and don’t know what to expect, because you don’t. See what you can see. Attend to both inner and outer landscapes. Get to know the neighborhood. Saunter for a while, then stride for a bit, then saunter again. Let yourself return the gaze of others walking toward you if you wish, but only if you wish. Let yourself wonder about the lives of those who live behind the shutters of that particular house, notice the way the leaves of that tree curl and turn lighter at their ends at this time of year, and feel the air on your skin as you walk along. Savor what your body can do.
In the words of poet and essayist Annie Dillard, “Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
