WHY WALK
Many years ago, I decided that the cure for my ecocide-induced melancholia lay in creating distance between me and society To do that, I had to find a way to retreat. Some might have chosen monastic life or hermitic solitude. But I didn’t want to banish all humans from my life. In fact, I find individual humans infinitely loveable, and I love making new friends and keeping old ones. I also find it difficult to be static. So life in a monastery was not for me.
​
I saw it clear as day from the start: my distance would be found in walking. Walking gives permission to live the unnormal. The focus of life is so different that people are more forgiving of your strange choices. You can step to the periphery of society, weave between spaces as you wish, and interact with cultural systems in ways that are conscious and never assumed. Rebecca Soinit, in Wanderlust: A History of Walking, coins it:
A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.
But why walk? Why not just ‘journey’? Why not cycle? Or hitchhike? What’s wrong with the odd bus or train?
​
A note against automated transport:
I don’t like the smell of vehicles - not trains, buses, cars, nothing. They smell of vacuum cleaners and air conditioning, and they taste of chemical air fresheners, body odour and fake food. I am easily motion sick, so can’t read or pass the time ‘usefully’. I spend my time waiting to get out. The speed of modern transport also discombobulates me. Covering thousands of miles in just a few hours, my body feels tricked into its new surroundings. It sometimes takes weeks to acclimatise. The journey is purely about gritting my teeth until I reach the destination. It is not relaxing. It does not promote inner peace.
​
A note against bicycles:
Bicycles are nice. For half an hour or so, I feel freedom in the spring of the tyre, I marvel at the physics of two wheels keeping me upright, and I enjoy the wind in my hair. After that, my entire undercarriage goes into rejection mode, and I dread the remount. Aside from the pain of it, I also have no cycling skills. I feel safe on an old-fashioned bike - one which has space for a wicker basket at the front, one that could clatter down cobbled streets in Cambridge, shaking the petals off your just-foraged elderflowers. But on a quick, modern bike, I ride with the grim reaper straddling the drop-handles. I can only indicate left on these bikes. The right hand must clamp itself around the handle bars at all times, for fear of high speed toppling. So I travel through cities in anticlockwise squares. A steep hill to fly down should buy me back some time. But I know I will fly too far - over the handle bars and into the back of a decelerating double-decker. So I get off and wheel my bike to the bottom of the hill. Cycling inspires less of a sense of freedom than impending death. It is not an efficient nor enjoyable use of my time or leg power. Again, I await the moment I can get off. This is no way to live. What’s more, if I were to enjoy cycling, I still think it is too fast a way to travel. My dreams would be filled with the never-ending blur of grey asphalt beneath me. I wouldn’t dare turn my head from the road for too long for fear of planting myself in a hedgerow. Cycling is not relaxing. It does not promote inner peace.
The result of flying over handle bars
So, walking is far safer than cycling, and far less nauseating than automated transport. But beyond the pragmatic, walking promotes spiritual health. It is grounding. Literally. No other mode of transport gives you direct contact with the ground. With bikes, trains, planes and automobiles, there is always a layer of metal or rubber keeping you separate from the earth. And for the pace of walking, it is the pace for making friends! Endless time to talk to butterflies or snuggle up to a grassy knoll. There is charming company to be found in mosses and flowers and rocks and, in walking, you are privy to their essence. There is time to celebrate the incremental changes of the skies, the landscapes, the communities of humans and non-humans and their ways of being. Nothing is a rude awakening. Life is gentle.
When people suggest other ways of travelling, it is because they worry that my journey will be unnecessarily long and arduous. Well, here I can assure them that, as perverse and non-sensical as it may sound, this is the kind of journey I am after. The Greek poet Kavafi instructs:
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery
...
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
I must stress that I am not a hiker. For me, hiking conjures visions of conquering summits and lusting for extreme survival experiences. I just walk. Stephen Graham calls it tramping. Tramping is done at no particular speed, with no particular hope for the day other than being open to what it holds.
​
In many ways, my walk feels like the start of my life - that my 35 years have merely been a long phase of preparation for this journey. At my most pensive, I say that my walk is a calling. Like many callings, it is outwardly illogical but makes complete sense to me. What’s more, right now, it is the only thing I can think to do with life.
​
Here follows the account of how I was lured by walking.
The photo above was taken in 2009 on the land in front of Uncle John and Joyce’s house in Umwinsidale, Harare. It was the dry season. The walk was very short, only 30 minutes for the dogs to stretch their legs. But I remember a wave of peace coming over me, and felt the butterflies in my solar plexus settle. I had just spent my university holiday “practising Zulu” in South Africa - in Margate and on the Wild Coast. The whole experience was illuminating. The spaces I stepped into were open, wild, exhilarating spaces. But wherever I went, I was overwhelmed by claustrophobia. I felt energised but had nowhere to put my energy. The space was there, but it wasn’t mine for the exploring.
I remember the same sense over four months in India. My time there was saturated with vitality, but something always hemmed me in. In a taxi ride up the hills to Darjeeling, on top of buses through Himachal Pradesh, hanging out of third-class train doors between Kerala and Goa, all I could do was envy the walkers: people, water buffalo, goats - anyone who was allowed to walk on the ground over which I was barely skimming. I felt restlessness and wanderlust even as I was discovering sub-continents. I could never find what I was looking for.
​
The more I sat, staring across landscapes from window seats, wishing I were out there with the walking creatures, the more I remembered that I am a profoundly physical person. My physicality gives me much of my identity, and almost all of my contentment. But ‘grown-up life’ has often filled itself so full that physical activity has been side-lined, and my identity and contentment have suffered for it. Deny my body its functionality and it pelts me with angry neurochemicals. I need to move. Muscles like to burn, fascia to radiate, my lungs to tingle as they reach their full capacity. My cerebellum delights in a forearm smash, or the reach of a port de bras. I’d gladly accept a six pack, but not for the sake of maintaining it. Only if it served the way my body wants to move.
​
So for me, walking is physical rehabilitation. When the day is about walking, it is easy to remember the body. It is no longer a secondary thought after a day in an office. The moment’s focus is given to arranging my backpack, dropping my shoulders, finding my centre of gravity. My neck recalls its length, my coccyx tilts and softens, and my feet find the earth, and start to spring. Through rhythm and repetition, creaks and tensions are ironed out.
​
Walking is also spiritual rehabilitation. In the walking life, there is permission to attend to the present. It is a moving meditation. My internal dialogue doesn’t pour scorn on how I spent yesterday. It just tells me to breathe more deeply, to soften my collar bone, wear my rucksack a little higher, take the incline on the balls of my feet. My body and soul recalibrate, and, once in flow, I find myself on the most marvellous of highs, saturated with a sense of goodwill to all things. This is how I would always like to feel.
​
Stephen Graham answers the why walk question much more neatly than I have. In “The Gentle Art of Tramping” (1926), his first lines capture it:
It is a gentle art: know how to tramp and you know how to live. Manners makyth man, and tramping makyth manners. Know how to meet your fellow wanderer, how to be passive to the beauty of Nature and how to be active to its wildness and rigour. Tramping brings one to reality.