“My God,” Bruce Chatwin once averred, “is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other god.”
We know that walking is good for us, that “if undertaken in regular doses,” as Shane O’Mara writes in “In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration,” “it provides the small, cumulative and significant positive changes for lung, heart and especially brain health.” What interests me, however, is less physiological, more elusive: walking as a way of life.
I am a city walker, which is to say I walk to root myself. I define my neighborhood by walking, both its boundaries and my place within them, my connection to community. Even in the middle of a lockdown, I am out most mornings, to get exercise, yes, but also to remind myself of where I am. This is the hard part — to pay attention, to remain in the present, to look outward as well as inward, now from behind the forbidding filter of my face mask, while recognizing, as Torbjorn Ekelund reflects in “In Praise of Paths: Walking Through Time and Nature,” that “the path is order in chaos.”
