About walking

After the last disaster with our landlady, when rage and worry was threatening to overwhelm us, we went for a walk.

This is significative. It is our usual reaction to quarrels, strifes, difficult moment of any kind.

Walking is healing, and it is a form of healing me and Eric can share, unlike gardening. There is something soothing in the rythm of the walk; the slow change of the scenery, perceivable as landscapes and minute details, distracts the brain just enough to allow some choerent thinking in the turmoil of emotions. It encourages constructive reasoning and conversation.

There is no other kind of travelling with these qualities for me.
Cars and trains are too fast, detatching you from the landscape. It is alienating to travel that fast, and yet motionless. It's a trip all concentrated on the arrival, the substance of the travel made worthless. There is no scope for unfolding complicated thoughts in a car. If I am driving I need to concentrate on what I do (or I should... sometimes I don't, and this is an expensive attitude, although very profitable for mechanics and car sellers). If I am a passenger I am soon bored, and unconfortable, the noise makes talking difficult, the view changes too fast for me to actually register anything, so that in short all my thought turns into a puddle of frustrated and confused misery, and I just hope for it to be over.
Trains are only marginally better. I find a train incourages self murderous introspection rather that clear thought in me. May be it is because the train moves on and on following (more or less exactly) a time table, and its moving has no relation to my will. I always feel fatalistic when travelling by train. The world is comingto an end, and nothing I can do will stop it. This is the usual sum of my train thoughts.
Bicycles are fun for a short while. They give an illusion of free, controlled, organic speed, of conquered superiority. That illusion in my case fades in a matter of 15 - 20 km, when my ass (pardon) begins to feel like something one does not want attached to one's body. More than that and the bike becomes a killer. I long for a closer contact to the surrounding, the tiny creeping sedum by the side of the road, a lovely glade of lush greenery, a curius stone, and there, it's done, my weel misteriously ends up into something hard, I swerve, I curse, and I am down, entangled into my own rucksack, trying to save the camera from harm. It doesn't need to be so bad every time, but it is a concrete risk. I had some really embarassing biking accidents in my time.

Walking is a way of moving around that is right for me. I am less of a danger to myself and others, and I earn something by the process that is more, much more than simply relocating myself from place A to place B.

Why is walking so good?
In the next days, I will have to read Chatwin again. He is guilty, guilty. If you want to live your life in a cosy flat, work yourself to safe (?) retirement, never wondering "What if...?", don't ever - ever - read Chatwin.