No Agenda Walking
Sometimes a walk is just a walk, or at least it should be.
What I read: “Walking as Inactivity” by Thomas J. Bevan. Posted August 5, 2024.
Sometimes I’ll be reading something and it’s so good I need to immediately tell someone about it. Since I’m a writer, I get to tell my readers about it. The post by Thomas J. Bevan I just read is one of those writings that made me instantly fire up my word processing application and start writing this post.
First off, Bevan’s post is excellent writing. Really excellent writing. The kind of writing that makes writers like me say to ourselves, “I wish I had written that.”
The vital thing to understand- and the point that I want to stress the most- is that walking is not an activity. Or rather, it should not be conceptualised as and reduced to being a mere activity. It is much more than that because it is much less than that. Walking is one of the great forms of inactivity and in a world of striving and consumerism and grasping and impatience it is one of only very few potential forms of inactivity left. It is that makes it precious.
You see, when you walk slowly and with no real destination in mind you are not doing, you are just being. Such walking, such contemplation is the beginning of freedom, it is the necessary pre-condition for having your own thoughts and as such for truly living your own life.
Bevan is alluding to something I've never been able to articulate as well as he has in his piece. That something is describing why, when I reduce what I love doing so much and so often, walking, to an activity, especially an activity that's measured in steps or distance or time or speed, it loses an important aspect of its essential nature.
Much like other things in life I've tried measuring when doing, the measuring ends up taking away something important, the joy of simply doing it. Whether it's my writing, yoga sessions, or walking, the moment I start to measure it, treating it as an activity to be dutifully checked off a list, it lessens the enjoyment and value of doing it for me.
These days, I resist measuring things in my life. In “Stop Measuring So Much,” I suggest that perhaps measuring things doesn’t always result in a metric that’s useful for gauging its benefit.
Most measurements are essentially comparisons. While in some cases measurements are vital, such as in science and research, when it comes to our own lives measuring can have many downsides.
I love walking so much I’ve written about it quite a few times. Here are some past posts you might find interesting.
“Going for a Walk Stimulates Ideas”
Now, as I do often when I complete a writing project, I’m going to put on some shoes and go outside for a walk. When I do, I’m going to resist walking for any reason other than simply to walk.
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