WALK

One of the things that I love about New York City is the element of walking.  Walking to the grocery store.  Walking to the movie theater.  Walking to the Yoga school.  Walking to the farmers' market.  Walking to the restaurant.  Even walking to the subway train. Walking can offer a unique perspective from what can sometimes be an insular experience of being in a car.

When someone asks me if I would move to such and such city, one consideration for me will often be if I would find myself always in a car. 

Recently I was reading that a ‘mile’ was a Roman measure of one thousand paces of two steps each.  It intrigued me how distance and the 'scale of space' was once measured against the capabilities of the human body and how far we could walk. *

The experience we have of a place on foot is also quite distinct, even in how we make spatial relationships against the backdrop of our body.  "Broadway is behind me.  14th Street is to the right of me.  13th Street is to the left of me."  We experience our surroundings in relation to the positioning of our body, in a way perhaps internalizing the landscape we travel.

There are spiritual traditions around the world where walking pilgrimages are still undertaken.  There is perhaps still this recognition of how arriving at a destination on foot allows us to feel more in step with where we are going.

Further:

-In the age of Uber, the age of being picked up & dropped off at the touch of a finger, walking may seem of primitive times. 

-And yet we are also experiencing a curious return to measuring how many steps we take a day, with 10,000 steps being the ideal health objective (according to some fitness apps). 

-While movement is one parameter by which health can be promoted, could the experience of better integrating with our surroundings in those 10,000 steps also be a trigger by which we feel ourselves at ease and potentially free of dis-ease?

- Like almost everything we are now beginning to outsource even self-knowledge, in this case to technology, as our understanding of our self becomes more and more data driven.   

Now more than ever, whether its conscious movement of the body on a Yoga mat or foot trails up a mountain or a running path by the river,  movement can allow not only a certain level of synchronicity with our surroundings that renders balance; but also a means by which we travel the internal landscape of our selves through an expanding experience of the 'scale of space'. 

*Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder