For the full life experience, put down all devices and walk

cheryl

cheryl

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For the full life experience, put down all devices and walk - Aeon

Pedestrian: a word fitted to the most drab, tedious and monotonous moments of life. We don’t want to live pedestrian lives. Yet maybe we should. Many of history’s great thinkers have been pedestrians. Henry David Thoreau and William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Mahatma Gandhi, William James – all were writers who hinged the working of their minds to the steady movement of their feet. They felt the need to get up and get the blood moving, leaving the page to put on a hat and go outside for a stroll. In doing so, they were in step with the antipodal forces of motion and rest, an impetus written into the laws of nature.

How many of us today are able to free ourselves from the page and head out the door when we rise from our desks? Even abiding by the dictates of nature, breathing deeply out in the open air as we set our legs into motion, it’s likely we need to accomplish the undertaking as quickly and efficiently as possible. But in so doing, perhaps we still miss the essence of the activity itself. We forego the art of walking.

‘Walking with a purpose’ is usually regarded as a positive thing, taken as a sign that people are focused, with eyes on an end-goal or prize. But the art of walking is not about purpose or aim. As Immanuel Kant maintained, the creation and apprehension of beauty is embodied in ‘a purposiveness without a definite purpose’. The art of walking is all about this purposeless purpose.
 
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