Power            Style             Wellness          Connections
How To Walk
By Mary Cartledgehayes

I always thought I knew how to walk. After all, I’ve been doing it for years. But then I
read my Cousin Nigel’s book about walking the moors near his home, and I found out
how little I actually knew.  Nigel is a multi-media artist.  I haven't seen this cousin since,
I suppose, the late eighties, when he built a bonfire at his mother’s that I’ve always
assumed was in honor of my visit. Since then he’s moved to Cornwall, married,
continued to record music (he was using things like synthesizers before I knew how to
spell the word), and taken up rambling through the countryside. Or perhaps I should
say he perambulates. “Rambling” is too casual a word for his excursions. I’ll get back
to those excursions of his.

When it comes to moving around outside, there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Walking can teach you how to overcome obstacles, help you to re-engage with your
city, or offer you a way of protesting consumer culture. In other words, walking can be
a stimulating, engaging, and potentially revolutionary action. Where else can you get
such a big payoff for so little investment in sporting goods?

How do these things happen? It depends on the form of walking you’re doing.
One walking method is called dérive. It’s a way of walking downtown that lets you re-
envision your relationship with urban spaces. Cities are built in ways that shuffle
people in predetermined directions, sort of like sending cattle down a chute. If you’ve
ever driven away from downtown after Thunder over Louisville, you may appreciate
that kind of shuffling. A concern, though, is that the design of cities is inherently a
method of control and/or of herding us into places where we can shop. As a result, we
are less than free. Cousin Nigel says that dérive is a way of “subverting the
commodified image of the city.”  How does it work? Well, you might use a map of
Lexington to find your way around Louisville. Why? Because you can see possibilities
in the city that you won’t see under ordinary circumstances.

Another way of being outside — and this one is closer to running than walking — is
called parkour, which means moving through the environment as quickly and
efficiently as possible. Picture a chase scene in a movie where people run as the crow
flies, jumping over subway turnstiles, sliding down banisters, leaping from rooftop to
train-top. If the YouTube (www.youtube.com) clip I watched is representative, there’s a
lot of leaping in parkour. It was the brainchild of a French naval officer who was in
charge of the rescue effort after a volcano in Martinique. Later, he developed and
taught this method. In practicing parkour, you are developing both your mind and your
body to overcome obstacles in an emergency.

These ways of walking, which I only understand for fleeting moments, change the
conversation to things more important than lowered blood pressure and increased
Vitamin D. Cousin Nigel, for example, is concerned with the pace of fragmentation in
contemporary culture. A major question he asks is, “How can we restore human
dignity in an age of digital slavery?”

His book, The Bodmin Moor Zodiac, documents one approach he’s taken. He began
with aerial photos of the moor where he lives. Looking to see which set of lines
created by roads, footpaths, creeks, etc., most closely lined up with lines in the signs
of the zodiac, he then threw in some random additions and withdrawals. And then he
went for walks based on the maps, using GPS, a camera, and written notes to
document the experience.

In a world we try so very hard to control, Nigel’s idea of jumbling things up on purpose
might seem foreign. And yet, that’s where the power lies.      
Why am I telling you all of this? Because, while walking offers health benefits, both
physical and mental, walking outside offers even more benefits. According to the June
15, 2007 The Week magazine, researchers at Essex University had a small group of
mildly depressed people walk for 30 minutes each day. Some walked inside, in a mall;
the others walked outdoors. I wasn’t surprised to learn that more than 70 percent of
the outdoor walkers felt less depressed. I was surprised to learn that only 45 percent
of the indoor walkers felt less depressed and — this was a shock — 22 percent felt
more depressed. I guess Mother knew best when she said, “Go outside and play.”
There’s more to this story, though, than physical and mental health; more than finding
ways to step aside from consumer culture. Parkour, dérive, zodiac-walking: they do
away with the deadly sameness of rote activity. Walking becomes, instead, a game, an
endeavor, a test, a question, an adventure, a curiosity, something to write home
about, something to write books about, something we do for the zest of it rather than
for the medical benefit. And that zest — oh, surely, that’s the first revolutionary step
toward restoring human dignity.