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hiker1
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Joined: 29 Aug 2009
Posts: 1624 | TRs | Pics
Location: West Coast |
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hiker1
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 Tue Sep 02, 2014 1:32 pm |
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Heaven’s Gaits: What we do when we walk.
| Quote: | | Why people walk is a hard question that looks easy. Upright bipedalism seems such an obvious advantage from the viewpoint of those already upright that we rarely see its difficulty. In the famous diagram, Darwinian man unfolds himself from frightened crouch to strong surveyor of the ages, and it looks like a natural ascension: you start out bending over, knuckles dragging, timidly scouring the ground for grubs, then you slowly straighten up until there you are, staring at the skies and counting the stars and thinking up gods to rule them. But the advantages of walking have actually been tricky to calculate. One guess among the evolutionary biologists has been that a significant advantage may simply be that walking on two legs frees up your hands to throw rocks at what might become your food—or to throw rocks at other bipedal creatures who are throwing rocks at what might become their food. Although walking upright seems to have preceded throwing rocks, the rock throwing, the biologists point out, is rarer than the bipedalism alone, which we share with all the birds, including awkward penguins and ostriches, and with angry bears. Meanwhile, the certainty of human back pain, like the inevitability of labor pains, is evidence of the jury-rigged, best-solution-at-hand nature of evolution.
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"Walking is not a sport,” Frédéric Gros announces, in the very first, single-sentence paragraph of his new book, “A Philosophy of Walking” (translated from the French by John Howe; Verso), already a best-seller abroad. ...
The purpose of walking, he tells us, is not to find friends but to share solitude, “for solitude too can be shared, like bread and daylight”; the philosopher Kant’s life “was as exactly ruled as music manuscript paper”; when walking, the body “stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape.”
Gros’s larger theory of walking, abstracted from all the abstractions, is that there are three essential kinds. There is the root case of contemplative walking (what you do to clear your head). There is “cynical” walking (the term referring to the Cynics of ancient Greece, homeless hippies who scorned conventions, customs, clothes). And then there is the composite contemplative-cynic, the modern city walker (what is often called the “flâneur”). Gros’s thesis is that the three kinds, developed over time, can now coexist, although, no surprise, the commodifications of capitalism make that coexistence hard.
Contemplative walking is Gros’s favored kind: the walking of medieval pilgrims, of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry David Thoreau, of Kant’s daily life. It is the Western equivalent of what Asians accomplish by sitting. Walking is the Western form of meditation: “You’re doing nothing when you walk, nothing but walking. But having nothing to do but walk makes it possible to recover the pure sensation of being, to rediscover the simple joy of existing, the joy that permeates the whole of childhood.”
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The Cynic philosophers of antiquity, in contrast, were often merely “circumambulant”—walking around and around the same few blocks in order to annoy other people. “All the commonplace compromises and conventions were booed, mocked, dragged through the mud,” Gros writes.
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From these two begetters, contemplative country hikers and argumentative city schleppers, all other walking descends. |
falling leaves / hide the path / so quietly
~John Bailey, "Autumn," a haiku year, 2001, as posted on oldgreypoet.com
falling leaves / hide the path / so quietly
~John Bailey, "Autumn," a haiku year, 2001, as posted on oldgreypoet.com
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Brucester
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Joined: 02 Jun 2013
Posts: 1102 | TRs | Pics
Location: Greenwood |
Early on I walked to emerse myself in nature like one does in a pond.
I loved and still love everything about the forest, desert or plain.
Walking being life. Careful because there are things that can take that away on your walk. Tread carefully and lightly.
I rememeber walking with my aunt, she said stay away fron the waters edge. I listened. There lay a giant water moccasin basking in the sun.
Look around, take it in and be aware of the dangers abound.
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Chief Joseph
Member
Joined: 10 Nov 2007
Posts: 7697 | TRs | Pics
Location: Verlot-Priest Lake |
I walk to get to places with a better view, and also so I don't have to buy new clothes. I especially like walking about a 1/2 or so after dinner, seems to settle my stomach.
Go placidly amid the noise and waste, and remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
Go placidly amid the noise and waste, and remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
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Backpacker Joe
Blind Hiker
Joined: 16 Dec 2001
Posts: 23956 | TRs | Pics
Location: Cle Elum |
I walk because I cant fly! How much walking does Superman do?
"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."
— Abraham Lincoln
 Bootpathguy, Cyclopath
"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."
— Abraham Lincoln
Bootpathguy, Cyclopath
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Cyclopath
Faster than light
Joined: 20 Mar 2012
Posts: 7715 | TRs | Pics
Location: Seattle |
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Cyclopath
Faster than light
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Sat May 14, 2022 8:14 pm |
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| Backpacker Joe wrote: | | I walk because I cant fly! How much walking does Superman do? |
This is solid logic, I can't argue with that!
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Backpacker Joe
Blind Hiker
Joined: 16 Dec 2001
Posts: 23956 | TRs | Pics
Location: Cle Elum |
LOL. Thanks CP.
"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."
— Abraham Lincoln
"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."
— Abraham Lincoln
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cdestroyer
Member
Joined: 14 Sep 2015
Posts: 1250 | TRs | Pics
Location: montana |
I walk because crawling is hard on the knees!
InFlight, Chief Joseph
InFlight, Chief Joseph |
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Chief Joseph
Member
Joined: 10 Nov 2007
Posts: 7697 | TRs | Pics
Location: Verlot-Priest Lake |
| cdestroyer wrote: | | I walk because crawling is hard on the knees! |
So is running.
Go placidly amid the noise and waste, and remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
Go placidly amid the noise and waste, and remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
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