Here’s a piece from the BBC magazine website, by Finlo Rohrer. I was interviewed for the piece and am quoted
in it here and there, so you know it must be good.
*
The slow death of
purposeless walking
By Finlo Rohrer
BBC News Magazine
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Not everybody is prepared to wait. There
are many people who regard walking from place to place as "dead time"
that they resent losing, in a busy schedule where work and commuting takes them
away from home, family and other pleasures. It is viewed as "an empty
space that needs to be filled up", says Rebecca Solnit, author
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
Then you may get the rewards. "Being
out on your own, being free and anonymous, you discover the people around
you," says Solnit.
