Walking towards Meaning
On why you should leave your phone and go for a walk.
After a day's walk, everything has twice its usual value - G.M. Trevelian
Last year, when I started to teach classes at The Socratic Experience I had zero experience with the Socratic method. Ironic, right? Well, after a year teaching through this method, I’ve become more careful about the conclusions I take from reading any text. I lost count of how many times, while talking with students, I was surprised by interpretations, questions, and hypotheses around texts that I thought I dominated. This has been extremely rewarding but also a cause for “writer’s block”. Nevertheless, I've been trying.
I’ve been reflecting on things we take for granted but may carry with it a deeper layer of meaning. One may argue that, with the right lenses, everything falls into this category. My attention, however, has been allocated to walking.
It started when, a couple of months ago, I had to pick a text to analyze in a Monday Socratic, an open event for students who want to try our model at TSE.
Last year, during Orientation week, some guides did a seminar on “Walking” by Thoreau but I wasn’t able to attend. This was the perfect moment to do it on my own. It made even more sense, when, a couple of days after picking that text, I was added to this group chat whose sole purpose was to remind his member to walk.
I live in this small village in Portugal so, 90% of the time I leave home, I do it on foot. This was another element that contributed to the category of “things I take for granted but might have a deeper meaning”.
Even before reading the text, I did some research on the topic, just to find people praising the habit of walking as a key to a spiritual revelation.
So, I went back to Thoreau's wisdom and his words about walking.
At the beginning of his essay, he speaks about absolute freedom, reminding us that, even though we live in a society, we’re actually part of something that transcends it: Nature. It’s only by embracing this that we taste our purest version and walking is a step towards that.
However, not everyone is able to walk the way Thoreau proposes. To set the scene, he talks about Sauntering, a word that has its roots in the Middle Ages, when people would roam around, asking for charity, so they could walk towards the Holy Land (Sainte Terre, in French). These people were baptized "Sainte-Terrer” or saunterer. This would be, Thoreau says, the truest form of walking.
If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again. If you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man - then you are ready to walk.
A little extreme, no?
And yet, like a Saunterer, to walk, to really walk, we must be able to let go of everything, finding a home, like Saunterers did, in whatever place we end up as a consequence of our walking.
“Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. (...) We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return - prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms”
This call for adventure is, I believe, the great bridge between what Thoreau writes down and a possible metaphorical interpretation of it.
If you want to leave your father, mother, and all of your possessions behind and go for a “true walk”, more power to you. But personally, I don’t want that. I just want to get my mind out of whatever's been bugging me, for a couple of minutes.
However, Thoreau is inviting us to do something different, a middle ground between mindless walking and leaving everything behind.
Thoreau asks us to embrace each walk as an adventure, "to never return".
Earlier this week, when I led a seminar on this text, a student analogized this idea to Buddhism: letting go of our desires and worldly possessions. In her view, leaving all of these “things” is what allows for the freedom of desire (triumphing over Samsara) and to walk is to live free from these earthly constraints.
It's an excellent perspective! I want to propose an alternative one as well.
Imagine you would go for a walk with the idea of letting go of who you are. More than your "worldly" possessions, leaving behind your own sense of identity. What if every walk was but an alchemical process from which you emerged with a new form of being?
Thoreau talks about a subclass of people, the Walkers, embodying the chivalric and heroic spirit once belonging to other classes. In his mind, “no wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God.”.
Well, what if you embrace which walk as if you were given that divine grace?
Some people see walks as a physical exercise. And even though it helps with a series of health issues, that's far from what he’s referring to. He reinforces, once again, that it must be "the adventure of the day". Even if you're just doing a "small expedition", you must still see it as an adventure, as something about to happen, something that can change you.
The key secret to this process, he argues, is that you must walk like a camel, "which is to be said the only beast which ruminates while walking".
It's only when you allow yourself to be free from "your duties towards society", that you can let your mind wander, much like your body, and see what naturally emerges out of that.
If you do this often, eventually, you'll find yourself spending more and more time outdoors, "in the sun and wind", which Thoreau argues, produces a certain roughness of character, "a thicker cuticle" over some of the finer qualities of our nature. Spending too much time indoors will, he says, have the opposite effect, bringing a softness and increased sensibility. Much like Mishima's main theory in Sun and Steel, finding a balance between these elements, between the outdoors and indoors, or the world of muscles and the world of words, is of extreme importance.
Walking is, I believe, a great way to harmonize these two worlds. I would even argue that is the best activity to do this. It works like a portal to this balanced, harmonious dimension. Contrary to any other physical activity, except, maybe, running, it is designed, from the get-go, to be something that allows for the physical and mental to unite and become one.
The biggest gatekeeper I have found to this tool is a result of technology hindering itself in almost everything we do, including walking.
I live in a small village, so, unless we have a storm outside, I'm walking every single day. Out of those walks, I would say, 90% of them are made with headphones on, listening to some podcast or some music. This is, of course, a "violation" of the sacred element of walking that we're discussing. It doesn't allow for the emergence of thoughts and ideas because I’m occupying my own bandwidth with the thoughts and ideas of others. It also makes it hard to notice the surroundings and be involved in the "physical" part of walking. I’m willing to bet that the same happened to you.
I was invited to a group chat where people post pictures of trees they see while walking. I thought to myself: "I'm not sure if I would have enough content to post regularly, after all, I do tend to walk always in the same place". To prove my own point, I left home, without AirPods, looking for trees.
I lost count. They have always been there. I merely wasn’t paying enough attention.
Since then, I've divided my walks into 2 categories. If I'm going out to buy groceries or take the trash, I'm allowed to take music or podcasts with me. However, I'm focusing on making at least one walk, where I don't take anything.
This has proved extremely useful. From business ideas to full classes, or even essays like this one, all of these thoughts and concepts have emerged while taking these walks. So much so, that, even when I'm taking the trash out or going to buy some groceries, I start with music, but I end up pausing it and just ruminate, like a camel, in my own head.
I believe you could be happier if you did the same!
So here's a challenge: Embrace this process and lean into the transformation.
Go for a walk today and let me know how it went.
I've been making more of an effort lately to walk without headphones too, sometimes after a little bit of meditation (which I find gives me a similar mental effect to a long walk, giving everything "twice it's usual value" as Trevelian put it). And honestly the joy I've been finding in simply looking at trees is incredible. As you said, they've always been there, but now they feel so much more alive to me.
I've been planning on writing an entire essay on it actually, mostly to try to clarify to myself what exactly it is about trees that has awoken to me, but it's a change that's been very welcome. Everything else has started to appear a little more beautiful too, but trees most of all.
Though your essay is about the simple act of walking, it is far from pedestrian. Rich considerations for the sole. Daily cycling has been my therapy of choice for many years now. There's is something about watching the world go by that is deeply healing, especially when it's nature I am passing through.