Slowness and walking

Jun 26

“I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.”

Walking constitutes a prime modality of experience, which is often taken for granted

and seen as one of the mundane routines of our everyday life. Yet, walking, the

French neurobiologist Alain Berthoz reminds us, even when viewed as a basic act

of locomotion, “is not simple”; it involves much more than keeping your balance

and making steps: “You have to go somewhere, following a path. And you have to

use your body to produce a trajectory” (138). The control of locomotor trajectories

requires the coordination of four core elements of walking: posture, locomotor

rhythm, gaze, and gesture (Berthoz 120), which are dependent on complex neural

organizations and processes involved in the walker’s unified perception of the body

and its relation to the surrounding environment. Our locomotion requires not only

making successive steps but also navigating the diversified “scapes” of our lives

(such as negotiating our way through rush hour crowds, bushwhacking or traversing

scree fields etc.) employing qualitatively different styles of locomotion (strolling,

jogging, trekking, fast hiking, and so forth). In all of these styles we find ourselves as

embodied subjects tracing trajectories that reveal what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has

called “the lived perspective” of the experiencing self.

Arek Misztal