The Art of Walking: Delights of the Ordinary No. 11
attend to the details with optimism.
We see, but we do not notice. We hear but do not listen. We are not blinded, but we have blinders.
Until now this year has been a year of drizzles and downpours, of hurricanes and heatwaves and all these weather conspiracies are letting the tomatoes die an expensive death.1 And amidst all of this, I hope you have not given away on your dreams and are doom-scrolling the internet mindlessly.
In another six months, we will be cheering ‘Happy New Year’ to our friends and family, giving ode to bygones and launching fresh resolutions. Hence, I wish to have a conversation with you about how you and I can make our today more alive rather than awaiting the future or peeping into the past.
And that is why let’s talk about the art of walking, since in our devastating high-rise living culture, we have absolutely detached from this ordinary idea.
The Tiersome Mental Avalanches
As I take up attempts to dig into our work cultures, to seek the ordinary and write about it, I am desiring to organise my time so I may read more, write more and start an exercise routine including moving around. Yet, I am scathingly able to find 10-15 minutes in my entire day for some desolate stretches and poses. Rest I live in a hope to maintain a distilled world on its own without doing much about it!
Because technological, problem-solving advancement has left us modern human beings with two kinds of attention avalanches:
The vigilance avalanche mode: keeps us on guard by having a quick life-saving response of flight or fight mode from a loose Lion, a berserk Boss or a deranged driver on the road.
The selective avalanche mode: subconsciously makes shorter impulses for us to attend only to what is urgent or pleasurable, enabling us to block out everything besides what we like to consume. (Imagine Reels and YouTube shorts)
And so we may know that the art of walking can be the antidote to this modern hamster’s-wheel-run culture and the tyranny of hustling around. To an extent at least!
What is the Art of Walking?
The art of walking is in being the investigator of the ordinary. The ordinary which is just beside you. Viewing the street, the neighbour and everything in it— the stranger passing by, a brave weed sprouting on the arid footpath, a sleepy dog.
“A walk is not necessarily the purposeful and linear transfer of a body from point A to point B, but rather an exploratory exercise in touching and… tasting textures and surfaces, pointing at sights, pausing to absorb the tickling brush of the breeze: A walk is, instead, an investigatory exercise…
— Maria Popova
The art of walking is to become attentive to the vast majority of what is happening around you because, honestly, in the pursuit of achieving the extraordinary, we miss the events unfolding around us, in us, in the distance, and right under our noses.
Are you not missing right now the hum of the air con, the expected ambient of your room, how your back presses against the chair, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the constant whirr of a distant lawn-mower, the blurred view of your own hands, a buzz of a bug or whirl of a washing machine. We miss the details and the awareness almost every minute.
Developing that sort of attention and wonderment when you take up your walk is the art which we all can learn. It is where you start rearranging your sense of sight, sense of smell and sense of hearing.
In my expediency of life, I have attempted the art of walking only twice in these six months! Though I wish to take more of them.
Cultivating the Spirit of Sauntering
Sauntering (v): is to walk in a slow, relaxed manner. Originating from late Middle English it is used in the sense ‘to wonder.’
Observation is a visual workout which is utterly lost somehow though we are all visually ignited beings. We have a trichromatic vision, painting a technicolour, million-coloured landscape of the world. And as city dwellers, we skip sufficiently our observational qualities because to varying degrees we are being thrown at the deep ends of high-pressure conditions.
As much as it is a sad condition, we can lean into the power which comes by loosening our tendons and tenderising our tough borders allowing us to observe what has been lost from our eyes all these years.
Take a walk with toddler.This is because they still are enchanted with the ordinary tweets of the birds and swoosh of the wind and crackling to the world around them. As adults part of what restricts us from observing the loveliness in the ordinary is, we already have an expectation or bias about what we should see or would see. We are driven to widen our productive cult life, and our attention to inquisitiveness fades away.
And in some way, we can try again to take a walk, as Maria Popova puts it, “only to zoom in on the details held within. It was a vision that let me miss the forest and see the trees. Rather than words, I saw the components of words. Some small part of my brain (the linguistic part) rested; the shape-identifying part hummed with activity.”
When you have the choice, choose wonderment.We all are urbanised humans who have learnt to defend our fast-paced life with much praise and hold pride in it. But if we could redo the whole work culture thing once again, maybe we would provide an addendum to this answer. That is: you have a choice! We have a choice!
We are schooled with the belief that promotion in our careers is as much about self-promotion too. And work is mostly like our babies for which we would give our all, that we haven’t learned to let go of and allowing it to be a reflection of ourselves. So even when we walk we walk with occupied minds as we course through.
So when you have a choice choose wonderment. A small wonder can have a huge impact. “Viewed with this lens, the city feels less artificial. The cold stone is natural, almost living: it absorbs water, warms under the sun, and sloughs its skin in rain.”
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?
— Henry David Thoreau
We think we control most of what happens to us. But the world is an absurd, unexpected, uncontrolled territory over which we have little control. All it takes is one algorithm tweak, one investment gone wrong, one missing document in our tax filing, taking a wrong turn, one stormy day, and things can spiral down a rabbit hole.
So I would love if you could take part in a walk even when you want to hold to the pessimism more. A walk that lets you come back home with a much larger view of life.
We should be optimistic not because our problems are smaller than we thought, but because our capacity to solve them is larger than we thought.
In as much I write to you I also am prepping myself to make these optimistic amendments in my life nuances and learning the art of walking. And since it is such a vast topic we cannot talk all about it. As I would explore more I would touch upon this topic more.
To bring things together with the poem By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer because it gives sufficient view to see the magnitude of how much we can miss in the world which is full of wonders.
Watching my Friend Pretend Her Heart is Not Breaking
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Hoping you have a great week full of attentive wonderment when you take a walk.
I am in awe! of all you have said, I took time to read. Or in other words, I walked through this. I allowed myself mentally to Saunter with all those words. It is so artistically stitched together, from the words to the quotes, the pictures and the poem all adding up to the ordinary story. I am encouraged with your honesty about being able to walk only twice in six months, makes us it more relatable. I am craving for more, as you keep discovering, please keep sharing more...
Wow..... thanks for sharing detailed perspective on walking .... lever looked at it this way.
Walking is enjoying life.