Pedestrian: a word fitted to the most drab, tedious, and monotonous moments of life. We don’t want to live pedestrian lives. Yet maybe we should. Many of history’s great thinkers have been pedestrians. Henry David Thoreau and William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Mahatma Gandhi, William James – all were writers who hinged the working of their minds to the steady movement of their feet. They felt the need to get up and get the blood moving, leaving the page to put on a hat and go outside for a stroll. In doing so, they were in step with the antipodal forces of motion and rest, an impetus written into the laws of nature.
The Art of Walking (Without Distracting Devices), By John Kaag, professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and author of Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life and Susan Froderberg, author of the novels Old Border Road and Mysterium.
An email I recieved this morning from The Blue Zones was all about walking. I have been reading about and following The Blue Zones for a really long time… The concept behind studying populations around the world that have groups of long lived folks within them at greater prepotions than in the general population just seems so right. And what their studies have found is pretty amazing.
Informed and inspired by the world’s longest-lived cultures, we help people live longer, better lives by improving their environment.
The Blue Zones Mission Statement
Every culture they studied, moved as part of their everyday life. Movement with purpose. Once upon a time, back when the woods behind my house were actual woods and not cattle pastures… I would go for a walk along a set of trails I kept mowed. All in all there were about a mile of trails weaving thru the woods.
Just me and our two dogs. Walking… stopping… sitting… walking some more. We spent part of each day exploring that part of our world. An area of about 25 acres, full of birds and wildlife, snakes and spiders and dragonflies. After my grandson was born and started walking, he joined the dogs and I, along with our cat in these daily walks. We weren’t in a hurry, we weren’t trying to get anywhere… we were just walking… with a purpose of seeing what we could see.
When we give ourselves over to the art of walking, we exist in the moment for no reason or purpose other than that of the experience alone, for the appreciation and apprehension of beauty. There is no purpose in this occurrence, only the immeasurable effect it has on our nerves, our body, our being. Woe the society that sees little or no value in this.
The Art of WALKING
So maybe we all should get out, wherever we are, and go for a walk today…