From Great Authors to Aborigines, we all strive to walk for that ‘privileged moment’

“Only thoughts that are reached by walking have value” – Nietzsche, 1889

By Michael Molyneaux

Late last autumn, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, I asked a man for directions to La Rosa Negra restaurant. “Well, I know the place,” he said, “but it’s a very, very long walk.”

I listened as he told me the way – his face conveying his sympathies – and set out on my journey across the city. I arrived at the restaurant eleven minutes later.

Walking enables us to drink in the world’s details and listen to its color schemes, notice its daily working rhythms, how limbs look when they walk, the couple holding hands, their expressions when they both turn away, the prevailing wind pushing the clouds above the houses, so many things we whiz though blindly; things that simply walking a while – slowly, alone, deliberately – may be able to bring us back towards.

Such experiences are not uncommon in modern cities. As with waiting – be it at bus stops, traffic lights or fast-food counters – the art of walking is a skill that western muscles are swiftly losing. Anatomically, as a species, we evolved to endure long waits (comfortable buttocks) and long walks (large feet).

But our mental apparatus seems to have taken a short-cut. As city dwellers, we rely largely on motorized transport. The soil, distances, the horizon have all become foreign, intangible things; left to gather dust in the recesses of our psyches. We live fast and irresponsibly and call it freedom.

By walking alone without a fixed destination – be it out in the countryside or along a quiet street at night – we can sometimes arrive at what has been called the “privileged moment”; when we become aware of the feel of conscious thought.

Walking allows humans to sit back and relax into the natural contours of the mind and inhabit a forgotten state: the disembodied storybook world of unbroken linear time, without the speeded-up machine-gun distractions of digital newsflashes, the rapid-fire bombardment of impersonal communications and lightning-fast run-of-the-mill bus rides where the world seems little more than an extraneous cinematic backdrop of blurred high-octane empty scenery.

Mindful Walking

That said, the opposite of mindful walking – absent-minded sitting – can prove equally insightful, only for different reasons. There is a certain romantic pleasure that we one experience in no other way than when taking long journeys.

When we idly gaze out the window – oblivious to time and the contents of our visual field – we are relying on some faceless external agent to transport us to our destination while we remain wrapped, lost and rapt in our absence.

Freud would trace this tendency to the childhood state of being clasped safely in our mother’s arms while being carried on walking journeys that involved no conscious effort on our part: why else are you rocked to sleep by the movement of a traveling vehicle?

Psychogeography

As a psychosomatic process, our phenomenological perspective on the world is directly influenced by our body’s state. By walking and circulating the blood though the body, creative ideas bubble to the surface and our mood is often lifted. One of the most common recommendations to sufferers of depression is to take regular exercise, such as walking. Countless writers – from Rousseau to Thoreau to Chatwin – have expounded the merits of walking for self-awareness, health and creativity.

In his 2012 book, The Art of Wandering Merlyn Coverly argues that writing and walking are in fact the same activity. This idea of the writer as a walker can be traced back to the Scottish explorer of the high California sierras, John Muir, who penned the famous adage that “going out […] was really going in”.

Muir, who escorted President Theodore Roosevelt through Yosemite in 1903, founded the Sierra Club and through his writings and environmental activism opened a path (in some cases literally) for generations of American walkers.

The idea of going in by going out has recently enjoyed a popular resurgence through the literary movement Psychogeography.

A book by Will Self and Ralph Steadman (2007) entitled Psychogeography (based on the Independent newspaper column of the same name) weaves exploratory anecdotes of “urban walking” with belletristic musings, literary responses to altered states of mind, shifting temporal frames and the perceptual privileges bound up with the (deliberate) act of walking.

Robert Macfarlane explored the relationship between walking and the evolution of human imagination in his award-winning debut Mountains of the Mind (2003).

When Aboriginal Australians go walkabout they are making journeys that embody poetry in its original sense of autopoiesis (self-creation): a lived poem that retraces in song the subject’s ancestors’ ancient routes along songlines and dreaming tracks. The original Aboriginals were, literally, singing the world into existence.

Would it be so far-fetched to say the same type of spiritual engagement is possible – with the right kind of eyes and measured the force of will – walking along a busy London high-street on a drizzly Tuesday evening? If we are to believe Baudelaire, Paris, too, was “a book to read by walking her streets.

Perhaps the setting is less important than the method. In Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert M. Pirsig points out that it is not the electronic devices or modern conveniences or man-made machines that rob us of our self-sufficiency, sensuality, and spirituality, but our attitudes towards these things – how we use and value them.

Technological advancement in and of itself is neither a good nor a bad thing. It has no inherent value independent of us. Becoming cut off from the natural pace of the world cannot be attributed to the invention and ubiquity of technology, rather our inability to balance our lifestyle between the industrial and the natural elements of our world.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Edmund Husserl indicated that consciousness is always conscious of – it always has an object; is never completely bare or without content. Buddhists have been silently wrestling with this same question for centuries.

Walking is certainly no panacea for the daily conveyor-belt of our mental distractions and trivialities. But by walking and going out to “clear my head” my thoughts can become colored with the world I am living through in real-time; not sped-up, hand-picked or dumbed-down as when we flick through a magazine or surf the internet or are transported through a big city’s neon labyrinth of billboards and shop-windows in a fast flow of traffic.

The Voice of the Earth

It is relatively very recently that philosophers have given serious attention to the importance of wilderness in relation to our conscious well-being, or as having inherent value.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Deep Ecologists like Arne Naess highlighted the intrinsic worth of the natural environment (something only one government to date – Ecuador – has enshrined in its constitution).

Merleau-Ponty made the same argument from a Phenomenological perspective, pointing to the natural world as enhancing our fundamental grasp of the Invisible and enabling us to understand ourselves as beings in the world (Ted Toadvine Ecophenomenology; David Abram Spell of the Sensuous).

Of course walking, like feeling relaxed or meditating, is possible in urban as well as natural environments. But perhaps the wilderness is more conducive to entering into conviviality with the primordial nature of things; with the idea of a universe whose nature also exists within us and precedes any subject-object division of man and world.

As our old friend John Muir said: “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

The city has now become such a fundamental part of our visual reality that our perception and understanding of being-in-the-world (Dasein) – our sense of identity and Place – are shaped and underscored by it.

Civil liberties may be plentiful in the West, but it seems we have forgotten – be they glass and steel skyscrapers or lush swathes of the rainforest – how to become conscious of the surroundings through which we habitually walk.

Michael Molyneaux is a philosophy graduate from the north of England. He currently works as an English language teacher in Malaysian Borneo.