Walking is one of the most basic things a person does, but I believe it is one of the most fulfilling. Walking is an adventure, walking is a meditation, walking is self-actualization. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel or teach grandmothers to suck eggs, but sometimes I think we take it for granted.
Just like Nietzsche and whoever came up with the paleo diet, I believe we can take cues for leading our best life from the way humans conducted themselves before the miracle/disaster that was the Neolithic Revolution. Not because I want to see myself as an heir to a philosophical tradition of naive pastoralism that elevates the “noble” hunter-gatherer above the beset and beleaguered urbanite, but because I find it hard to believe that hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary adaptation can be undone in ten thousand. It’s not that I believe evolutionary forces haven’t affected us in recent millennia, only that we are in fundamental ways still the same animal we were before bread, cities and pottery.
In essence, I think an old-fashioned human life consisted of two general activities: wandering around during the day, hunting and gathering, and sitting around the fire at night, sharing food and telling stories. In our modern lifestyles, telling stories by firelight has been adequately replaced by Netflix and movie theatres, and sharing a meal is still sharing a meal, but sitting or standing in an office, store, or other workspace all day is no substitute for wandering the landscape.
The natural benefits of walking, which I believe we are evolved to experience, go beyond the physical. Yes, walking is good exercise for your muscles, including your heart, it helps digestion and other bodily functions, including thinking, by getting your fluids flowing, but it also provides more profound benefits.
There are many ways to travel through a landscape, and one can honestly say one has been a place and seen a place after passing through it in a car or train, or on a bike or boat, but I believe we evolved to experience a landscape at a walking pace. Those who know me well know I do everything a little slower, including thinking and making life-decisions, so maybe it’s just me, but I find that only walking allows me the space to notice all the details of a place and the time to deeply contemplate it as I pass through.
This is my personal philosophy, formed by my own thoughts and experiences. I don’t know if it’s perfectly logical and defensible, but I know it is true for me. All of which is to say, the focus of this site will be on the experiential lessons of the landscapes I visit, rather than on the fitness metrics. Rather than distances and number of steps, I hope to track history, ecology, and the more elusive prizes that can only be found by actually going somewhere.