As it was mentioned in previous adventures (for example here or here), I love walking. I love walking even in quite a hostile an environment as a big city. I find it necessary, not only for the body, but as mental hygiene. And by walking I don’t mean going from one place to another, but conscious walking: walking just for the sake of it, paying attention to what comes in your way, thinking, letting yourself go without any purpose in mind.
I never liked running because I don’t see the purpose of it; I mean, I once was chased by a bull (I’ll tell the story one day), and you bet I ran then; in fact, I never knew that a human being could run so much. But running with no more object than running looks to me like being the pimp of your own locomotive system; to me, all toiling exercise should have a purpose: building a pyramid, making love, moving to a new house. But exercise that is its own purpose? Life is too short for that.
Back to walking, it always surprised me the lack of bibliography on the issue. It is one of the four human positions, after all, and not the least important of them. I read the famous essay by Thoreau, but I found that it was too vague.
Maybe we are too concentrated on the seated position, instead. We work seated, we move seated in our cars. I think car has become way too important. In those days when I get very angry with our unnatural way of living, I agree with the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, who said that “All in all, a car is only a wheelchair”. Not always, not always, because technique is wonderful and so on, but sometimes a car looks to me like a cage, or a coffin (their internal and external design are very alike). Sometimes I feel sorry for minivans in the same way as I feel sorry for people with morbid obesity.
So here are a few observations taken from my hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of simple walking, in a way the kind of “scientist” approach that I miss so much around on the issue:
Principles
- The principle of novelty: the first time you go through any place, it looks larger, and it takes longer to go through.
- The principle of habituation: but those zones that are very habitual for you take also a lot to go through.
- The honeymoon principle: those areas that you have visited only a few times are brief and very nice to see. You are not intimidated by the new environment anymore but you still don’t see the flaws. It is the optimal moment.
Those principles lead to the rise of an important concept: subjective efficiency. When you are going to have a joywalk, or simply a functional walk, you can find that maybe a course that is longer in meters is better for you because of its novelty; and it will feel shorter, so it will be shorter. It always seems funny to me that obsession with “objectiveness”, those guys who say “x is not important because it is something that we cannot measure, it is only human subjectiveness”. I always feel the impulse to ask those people, “so what are you, a cow?”.
You know what they say, there is no freedom without limitation. When you go for a random walk, it is good to set some fixated rule set, a limitation factor that grants a structure for the whole experience. For example:
- set a destination but be flexible about the course to follow. Some green traffic lights are like an invitation. If you are good at following those sudden hints, and learn to let your left brain rest a little (more about that little bastard here), you can gather momentum to an extent in which you won’t feel you’re walking, but rather being walked, like water that’s been going down a slope for a while.
- The opposite: choose to go through particular streets, but without setting a clear destination. Literally, the journey becomes the destination.
You can use those principles one way or another to model the kind of walk you want to have. In function of the scenario and how you feel, in certain areas you will better apply capillarity (taking always the street of less resistance-less traffic, avoiding mobs), or variety (priority for new landscapes in spite of showing other difficulties, because variety will make subjective time profitable), etc… All those factors are what make taking a walk a subtle, yet secret, art.
So shut the computer now and go out for a walk. Right now. If you’re a rookie you can help yourself with some faint excuse like purchasing milk or something like that, but be sure to choose the course subjectively, not in meters. Then come back and tell us: how did it go? What did you discover?
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A new way of being positive
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More about being absolutely positive
Sick (but not tired)