Fast World, Slow Feet: Why We Need to Walk More
Walking is good for mind, body, and soul
A few years ago, someone reported me to the police.
I wasn’t selling drugs or stealing a car or making too much noise in the middle of the night. I wasn’t even breaking the law. My only crime was to stroll through a neighbourhood in a US city where walking is not the done thing.
“People here drive everywhere,” the policeman told me. “Walking sets off alarm bells.”
A joke, right? Wrong. In a world in thrall to cars, walking is often seen as deviant behaviour.
I grew up in a Canadian city where people drive a few hundred metres rather than use Shank’s pony. My earliest memory of walking to high school was hearing some guy hangin’ out the passenger side of his best friend’s ride trying to holla at me: “Get a car, loser!”
In many cultures, landing your first set of wheels is a rite of passage, a passport to adulthood. Driving can certainly boost your dating odds. Remember that famous line from Grease: “Tell me more, tell me more, like does he have a car?”
Small wonder the World Health Organisation described walking as a 'forgotten art'. To make matters worse, when we do walk, it’s often with a very modern blend of impatience, distraction and goal hunting. We spend much of the time staring down at our phones: scrolling through social media, using apps to count our steps, cursing anyone who dares to dawdle in our path.
All over the world, distracted pedestrians get hurt walking into lamp-posts, fire hydrants or even passing traffic. I recently witnessed a head-on collision between two office workers on Madison Avenue in New York. Both were walking briskly while gazing down at their phones. Both ended up with coffee all over their suits.
Some years back, Brick Lane, a hipster haven in London, came up with a tongue-in-cheek way to curb walk-and-text injuries: wrapping local lamp-posts in foam padding.
The truth is we need to walk more – for our health and for the sake of the planet. But we also need to walk better.
French has a wonderful word: flânerie. It means strolling without any goal in mind beyond exploring, observing and savouring. When you channel your inner flâneur (or flâneuse), you notice flowers and trees, clouds in the sky and hills on the horizon, how the light dances on water or across the windows of a building. You hear birdsong and the laughter of strangers. You take pleasure in what others are wearing and doing.
Walking like a flâneur is a balm for the mind. It is ‘slow’ in the very best sense of the word.
In the 19th century, Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher, used his daily constitutional to silence the chatter in his head: “I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
Shakespeare was on the same page. In The Tempest, Prospero says: “A turn or two I’ll walk, to still my beating mind.”
Walking can even be a path to enlightenment. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen master, argued that a mindful stroll can bring spiritual clarity and heal both the walker and the world.
Ambling also fires up the imagination. That’s why big thinkers, from Aristotle to Virginia Woolf, have hailed the creative power of a good walk. William Wordsworth composed much of his poetry while wandering lonely as a cloud through the English countryside. “All truly great thoughts,” said Nietzsche, “are conceived while walking.”
Nikola Tesla agreed. The inventor of the induction motor had his eureka moment while perambulating in Budapest. “The idea came like a flash of lightning,” he later recalled. “In an instant, the truth was revealed.”
Walking made a comeback during the pandemic. With normal life on pause, people everywhere (including me) embraced a daily stroll as a way to exercise, unwind or just get out of the house.
Even with the pandemic now a fading memory, I still take a long walk once or twice a week in my corner of London. My five-mile route winds along Victorian streets and across three parks.
And I walk it in full flâneur mode. No rush. No Fitbit. No music or podcast. No phone. Just meandering for the sheer joy of it.
The other day, as I sauntered past a pond in the park, a question popped into my head: Did the pandemic make flânerie permissible in that US neighbourhood where someone had once dialled 911 after seeing me on foot?
I emailed a local to find out.
“You’d fit right in here now,” came the reply. “I’m looking out my window and there's a bunch of people out there strolling around like they have all the time in the world.”
I love the idea of walking flâneur style anywhere especially somewhere new including in museums and galleries. A guided tour or an audio tool spoils it for me. Your observations of the US and Canada's attitude to walking is interesting. I led a group of teachers on a study visit to Canada some years back . We were looking at rural schools many of which were out in the middle of nowhere. We commented on the lack of any local shops but the response was always that shops etc were in retail parks. Some folk we met seemed amused by the idea of shopping locally. You got in your car and went to the shopping mall. Lovely trip and we did visit some beautiful towns with actual shops and streets to wander around. As to the screen obsession is it possible to put the genie back in the bottle. I feel sad when I see people out with their kids or babies and all their attention is on their screens with none for the kids.
Couldn't agree more about the joys of urban wandering. I'm a Londoner too, and I agree that it's pretty acceptable in most places here, although I quite like pushing the boundaries by going somewhere I'm not meant to be, for example walking round an industrial estate or slipping through a gate left accidentally open...