Walking is a natural function. Walking took on a special meaning culturally when it became part of ritual and religion. Walking became a special expression of piety in pilgrimage: the Christian Way of St. James, the hajj of Islam, the Kumbh Mela of Hindu India.
Similarly, ritual postures are performed successively to pursue a regime that approaches piety. These are pronounced in Islam, especially Sufism, and exist to a modest degree in Christianity. The Hindu tradition formalized ritual postures into yoga, where the concept of yoga is both a mental/spiritual discipline and a succession of formal postures performed. A simple manifestation of posture servicing religion or spirituality is the act of sitting in meditation.
Walking is a unique function in the pursuit of wisdom. To walk, to pursue a single “postural” expression repeatedly, not a step or pose but motility itself, with direction and vigor, is flexible, functional, and eminently simple. Sage individuals have incorporated walking into their lives as methods of insight. The examples are many. The Greek philosophers were called peripatetic because they had no fixed abode,thus no fixed posture, intellectually or physically. Atthe same time, they perambulated, walking while teaching. The hermits of ancient China regularly sought out mountains in which to dwell, walking many miles in seeking new homes. What more evocative scene than Lao-tzu, the author of the Tao te ching, walking westward and stopping at a final outpost to share his thoughts with a solicitous sentry there, and then walking onwards, not to be seen again.
In modern times, great figures who consciously walked include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Henry David Thoreau, author of “Walking,” but also of the substantial Walden, which includes vignettes of walking, and Hermann Hesse, author of Wandering. A hermit-walker is the narrator of Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees. All of thee authors and their works address solitude and the solitary life.
Thoreau understands that walking is more than merely a means of transport, from one point of business to another. He prefers sauntering, and notes the interesting derivation of the word sauntering as walking within san terre,literally “holy land.” Walking in nature transforms the land about into an idyll in paradise. It is a conscious means to an intentional end: without carriage, without animal transport, not an equestrian, not a rider, but a walker, a “more ancient and honorable class,” Thoreau notes.
Rousseau, in bitter old age, also took long walks from his city residence in Paris into the countryside, in an era when city’s edge was farmland and nature, not suburbia. Rousseau recorded his thoughts on these long walks, frankly missing details of nature for his own preoccupations, although like Thoreau and Emily Dickinson after him, avid collector of herbs and flowers that attracted his eye, pursuing an amateur’s botantical knowledge in identifying and collecting plants.
Hesse’s fictional Wandering, which reads like nonfiction, is filled with aphorims, romantic reveries neither Rousseau nor Thoreau. Hesse’s incorporation of nature in a philosophy of life is, however, reminiscent and full of depth, where walking, like wandering itself, is a metaphor for making our way through life. And the way, the path, is life itself, unfolding before us.
Thoreau emphatically rejects walking for exercise. Such walking lacks the essential attitude of attentiveness to nature. Thoreau owns that walking in the woods could mean long stretches of time without getting far distant. On the other hand, a villager could walk for exercise without noticing anything in surrounding nature, let alone the resident of our contemporary cities where green spaces are sparse and nature sadly suppressed. But, after all, Thoreau’s essay is titled “Walking, or The Wild” and his signature conclusion is that “all good things are wild and free.”