On Walking

I have been distracted of late, switching gears, trying to enter the mindset, the territory, of my book on Home.

While some might call what I am doing "research", it feels more like shpatziring, wandering around old ideas, rummaging around in old notes, window-shopping in books and quotes that line the avenues of my intellectual journey.

Amidst all this I had the delightful distraction of babysitting my 12-week-old granddaughter for two days. We played and sang and danced and ate but mostly, we walked.

Oddly, I was just then in the midst of reading Thoreau's short monograph called, "Walking." This is the source of Thoreau's famous comment, "In Wildness is the preservation of the World."

Now, Thoreau, in typical fashion, doesn't just talk about the experience walking; he doesn't even settle for describing the exultation of walking. Rather, he raises the act of walking to a fevered, ecstatic, conversionary crusade:

If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again – if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man – then you are ready for a walk…

Let's assume, for a moment, that these lines are just a bit overwritten, for effect. In which case, we can argue that for Thoreau, walking seems to be not so much a casting off on a journey-of-no-return but rather a pilgrimage, a discovery. It is an experience of walking away from ourselves so that we might ultimately be blessed with rediscovering ourselves. Such walking is revelation as much as locomotion; becoming lost as much as arriving.

Such walks do not happen quickly. They take time, no less than an hour or two, giving our minds a chance to empty and reset. The first half hour we often are accompanied by what we thought we left behind; we are occupied with mulling, reviewing, planning, plotting, stewing, muttering, wondering.

But if we are lucky, and we walk long enough, we can eventually jostle and loosen the matters of the world that cling to us like burrs to our socks, so they weaken their hold and fall off. It is only then, when our legs move of their own rhythm, and our brains spurn our familiar ramblings, that other, nascent, generative thoughts burst forth. The best of ideas often spring upon us, quite suddenly, like an animal bounding out of the woods. It was likely hiding there all along but we wouldn't have bumped into it if we hadn't gone for that walk.

Thoreau speaks of seeking this conjured oblivion, which takes time to materialize:

Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit…. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village…

Walking cannot be rushed; we must give the world time to let go.

But, as long as we are blessed with feet that work and with a schedule that allows us several hours a week to disappear (without head phones), we too can escape into the wilds or the woods, or simply the 'hood to empty out and fill up again.

(Photo from Diary of a Middle-Aged Gardener, http://rose-gardendiary.blogspot.com/2009/10/walk-in-woods.html)