Walking the Milford and Mindfulness
From the BBC http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27186709
A
number of recent books have lauded the connection between walking -
just for its own sake - and thinking. But are people losing their love
of the purposeless walk?Walking
is a luxury in the West. Very few people, particularly in cities, are
obliged to do much of it at all. Cars, bicycles, buses, trams, and
trains all beckon.Instead,
walking for any distance is usually a planned leisure activity. Or a
health aid. Something to help people lose weight. Or keep their fitness.
But there's something else people get from choosing to walk. A place to
think.Wordsworth was a walker. His work is inextricably bound up with tramping in the Lake District. Drinking in the stark beauty. Getting lost in his thoughts
"As
a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single
thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical
path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think
over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives."
Charles
Dickens was a walker. He could easily rack up 20 miles, often at night.
You can almost smell London's atmosphere in his prose. Virginia Woolf
walked for inspiration. She walked out from her home at Rodmell in the South Downs. She wandered through London's parks.
Henry
David Thoreau, who was both author and naturalist, walked and walked
and walked. But even he couldn't match the feat of someone like
Constantin Brancusi, the sculptor who walked much of the way between his
home village in Romania and Paris. Or indeed Patrick Leigh Fermor,
whose walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul at the age of 18
inspired several volumes of travel writing. George Orwell, Thomas De
Quincey, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bruce Chatwin, WG
Sebald and Vladimir Nabokov are just some of the others who have written
about it.From recent decades, the environmentalist and writer John Francis has been one of the truly epic walkers. Francis was inspired by witnessing an oil tanker accident in San Francisco Bay to eschew motor vehicles for 22 years. Instead he walked. And thought. He was aided by a parallel pledge not to speak which lasted 17 years.
But you don't have to be an author to see the value of walking. A particular kind of walking. Not the distance between porch and corner shop. But a more aimless pursuit.
In the UK, May is National Walking Month. And a new book, A Philosophy of Walking by Prof Frederic Gros, is currently the object of much discussion. Only last week, a study from Stanford University showed that even walking on a treadmill improved creative thinking.
"Some
years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a distressing
impression, caused me to walk about the streets all night, for a series
of several nights. The disorder might have taken a long time to conquer,
if it had been faintly experimented on in bed; but, it was soon
defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down,
and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise."
Across
the West, people are still choosing to walk. Nearly every journey in
the UK involves a little walking, and nearly a quarter of all journeys
are made entirely on foot, according to one survey. But the same study found that a mere 17% of trips were "just to walk". And that included dog-walking.
It is that "just to walk" category that is so beloved of creative thinkers."There is something about the pace of walking and the pace of thinking that goes together. Walking requires a certain amount of attention but it leaves great parts of the time open to thinking. I do believe once you get the blood flowing through the brain it does start working more creatively," says Geoff Nicholson, author of The Lost Art of Walking.
"Your senses are sharpened. As a writer, I also use it as a form of problem solving. I'm far more likely to find a solution by going for a walk than sitting at my desk and 'thinking'."
Nicholson lives in Los Angeles, a city that is notoriously car-focused. There are other cities around the world that can be positively baffling to the evening stroller. Take Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital. Anyone planning to walk even between two close points should prepare to be patient. Pavements mysteriously end. Busy roads need to be traversed without the aid of crossings. The act of choosing to walk can provoke bafflement from the residents.
The flaneur
- Oxford English Dictionary defines as: "A lounger or saunterer, an idle 'man about town'"
- Term originated in 19th Century France
- Poet Charles Baudelaire regarded as archetype
"A
lot of places, if you walk you feel you are doing something
self-consciously. Walking becomes a radical act," says Merlin Coverley,
author of The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker.
But even in
car-focused cities there are fruits for those who choose to ramble. "I
do most of my walking in the city - in LA where things are spread out,"
says Nicholson. "There is a lot to look at. It's urban exploration. I'm
always looking at strange alleyways and little corners."Nicholson, a novelist, calls this "observational" walking. But his other category of walking is left completely blank. It is waiting to be filled with random inspiration.
Many now walk and text at the same time. There's been an increase in injuries to pedestrians in the US attributed to this. One study suggested texting even changed the manner in which people walked.
It's not just texting. This is the era of the "smartphone map zombie"
- people who only take occasional glances away from an electronic
routefinder to avoid stepping in anything or being hit by a car."You see people who don't get from point A to point B without looking at their phones," says Solnit. "People used to get to know the lay of the land."
People should go out and walk free of distractions, says Nicholson. "I do think there is something about walking mindfully. To actually be there and be in the moment and concentrate on what you are doing."
Physicists who liked walking
- Werner Heisenberg liked to walk
- The full significance of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle only struck British physicist Paul Dirac when the latter was out for a long walk
- Otto Frisch and Lise Meitner realised the key principle behind atomic weapons on a walk in the snow. Technically, Frisch was not walking but on skis at the time
And this means no music, no podcasts, no audiobooks. It might also mean going out alone.
CS
Lewis thought that even talking could spoil the walk. "The only friend
to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of
the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to
assure us that the pleasure is shared."The way people in the West have started to look down on walking is detectable in the language. "When people say something is pedestrian they mean flat, limited in scope," says Solnit.
Boil down the books on walking and you're left with some key tips:
- Walk further and with no fixed route
- Stop texting and mapping
- Don't soundtrack your walks
- Go alone
- Find walkable places
- Walk mindfully
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