Researchers who study our brain activity while we walk use the term "automaticity" to describe how our body behaves on a stroll. Automaticity is defined as "the ability of the nervous system to successfully coordinate movement with minimal use of attention-demanding executive control resources."
We should leverage the gift of walking to stop thinking and start doing, apparently, what walking is asking us to do — pay attention to the stuff of place, the place itself. To arrive at that point takes time, and discipline, but when it does, delight bubbles up, a "praising of the mysterious and tender touching we are so often in the midst of," according to Ross Gay, poet and author of "The Book of Delights." Place comes to life, any place, from the life we gave it, from attentiveness.
When I walk, I say, "Now I'm walking." I ring a bell in my mind to get prepared. It doesn't matter if I'm going to the store or for a lunchtime stroll to catch a glimpse of a sexy tree — I know I'm walking. I breathe. I swipe left on everything that tries to lodge itself between me and the world. Pebbles crunch underfoot. Leaves smile in my eyes. Sounds emanate from bottomless wells. The world gets younger, exalted. I see, smell, hear and feel things I didn't before. It's not profound, not magic, but it is impossible to tie a ribbon around.
Not everyone can walk. That capacity may be denied to us at birth, or we can lose mobility over time. But walking is, in the end, a metaphor for being, a place and time — a place-time — gifted to us.
We could all use that gift.
Francis Sanzaro is the author of "Zen of the Wild: A Philosophy for Nature," "Society Elsewhere: Why the Gravest Threat to Humanity Will Come From Within," and other books.
Charles Darwin (
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