Coming Home – For A Walk

While on holiday recently I did my favourite thing and took myself off for a walk. It’s the only way to get to know a place in my opinion. Driving the roads doesn’t cut it in quite the same way.

I was feeling better for the time alone, with myself, who I really like!

Chrissie Swan (The Imperfects podcast, Season 5 Episode 1)

I took my phone for incidental photography only. No podcast, no music and definitely no conversation in my ears, only the sounds of the neighbourhood I am coming to know. It occurred to me that I hadn’t recorded the walk on my hiking app nor noted the number of steps I was taking for the first time in months. In my efforts to ‘count hikes’ it seems I have neglected the beautiful art of walking.

Do you walk?

When you walk a place you make its acquaintance, introduce yourself to it and it makes itself known to you.

When I come here I like to introduce myself to Country, say hello, let Country know who I am… You’ll have a better day if you introduce yourself to Country.

Richard Swain, Back To Nature (Episode 2)

Walking has always been my preferred means of getting around the place where I live. I learned the streets of Carlton walking to and from University and the supermarket and the various public transport stops that opened up the city to my exploration. I pounded the footpaths of Canberra when I moved there in an effort to calm my new graduate nerves at the end of each day. I would walk and worry about the patients I had seen that day, the decisions I’d made and the impact I might have had. I would walk until my body was exhausted enough to distract my mind and then I would go to my little room and sleep.

I pushed my babies in prams from our home in Bendigo and together we learned to know the streets around our home, watering the struggling street plum from our drink bottles during the drought and learning to cross a busy street on the way to school. My neighbour would appear silently on our driveway before 6am and, headlights on, we would walk the bush tracks near home, our voices the only signals keeping us together before dawn.

Walking has always been my go-to joy.

Chrissie Swan spoke emotionally about her discovery of the power of walking on The Imperfects podcast. She reminded me of how crucial going for a walk is in our busy lives. I wax lyrical about our home here at Ardley but I have to admit she does have one smallish drawback. To go for a walk in any of the beautiful forest that surrounds us we have to cross a highway. Sigh. Some days it feels like we can look as long as we do not touch that divine space.

I have a lovely little book of vignettes in history about the Joy Of Walking (called that, actually, it’s an obvious and appropriate title). The very first piece starts with an explanation of sauntering. 

sauntering: which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “there goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.

Henry Thoreau

I think this is a far more evocative term, don’t you? Hiking implies intention and purpose. Sauntering, ah, now that’s a lovely description of putting yourself into the laps of the gods and submitting to what will come. I’m in the middle of reading Walden by Thoreau. It’s taking me months to get through it. I’ll have to talk about that another time (he is really, really obnoxious!!!) but I will credit him with a deeply felt appreciation for the benefits of walking on your own two feet. He writes poetically about the connection he feels with the earth, about his sorrow for those who ride past in carriages or on horseback, missing out on the spiritual and intellectual gifts that stepping lightly on the ground can be yours.

He’s absolutely right… but I’m glad I didn’t have to walk alongside and listen to his sermons!

Ian and I spoke recently about the benefits and challenges of mindfulness and how differently we had experienced it. I have long understood mindfulness to be the result of taking a problem for a walk. Sometimes I am completely unaware of thinking at all, I am just moving effortlessly and it feels magical. Yoga does this for me as well, the rhythmic movements that the body so naturally follows and so gladly embraces as both comfort and nourishment. He, with his differently busy mind, had a completely opposite view and could not imagine anything more excruciating than submitting yourself to such a long period of time without music or something else to entertain the busy brain. I have been reluctant to call ‘going for a walk’ a mindfulness exercise. I mean, sure, it is that indeed, but I didn’t want it given such serious importance. I’d rather just lace up my sneakers and go just because I want to go for a walk. The recalcitrant child in me will turn around and stay on the couch if you make it trendy or medicinal or scientific in some way!