Reading "Heaven's Gaits", What We Do When We Walk. by Adam Gopnik

Read:  “Heaven’s gaits”  by Adam Gopnik, in this week's New Yorker, September 1, 2014.   What we do when we walk.    “Contemplative walking is Gros’s (Frederic Gros, "A Philosophy of Walking" (Transl from the French by John Howe, Verso) a best seller abroad) --  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.  ...Movement and Mind are related in Western thought.”

"The flaneur represents cynicism, but clothed and housed and only sporadically committed."   I knew I found that term applied to walking, suspect. In other words,a flaneuer is a "tourist". 

Gopnik continues: "Re reading the New York walkers, you find one note that eluded the cynic contemplatives of Paris: in New York, walking, even without companions, can still be an expression of companionship, of expanisve connection; a happy opening out to an enlarged civic self rather than a narrowing down to a contemplative inner one; a way of scooting toward the American Over-Soul, in sneakers. "

Whitman is described by Gopnik,  but his description also seems fitting on one level to Virginia Woolf.  Her wonderful short story about going out to buy a pencil and taking a walk in London exhibits this tendency of being with the world in walking.  I would say it is definitely true in NYC.  I walked from the Metropolitan Museum to 23rd Street, with stops for dinner with a friend, the last visit and in part it is the "communal" quality that prevails. 

When I lived in Manhattan, I thought nothing of walking 20 blocks. I preferred to do so...one feels so much more at one with the city, with the people...than the descent into the subway, which, however,  for long distances is required! Gopnik writes, "You go where your feet take you.  Buses follow routes and subways have schedules, but someone on foot goes wherever he wants."

Gopnik goes on to talk about how the walkman, first, and now the ipod, and how each  changes walking, and that is very true. I walked all over Manhattan and did the Brooklyn Bridge walk with Galway Kinnell leading the way and reciting Whitman, a greater walker, as was Edgar Allen Poe in Manhattan. I now use the ipod to drown out street noise or talking I do not want to hear.   

 I love walking.  I walk minimally, 3 miles a day, and try to walk 4 miles, a day, and feel best when I walk more than five miles a day.  I use a pedometer which is a part of my Apple ipod...my goal is 10,000 steps a day, and my absolute minimum is 5,000 steps a day.   I am ecstatic on the days when I do 12-14,000 steps which is about once or twice a week.  Most days are about 8,500 steps.(4 miles)  I found this monitoring keeps me mobile and requires me to keep "walking", or stay in motion.  Motion is good.