I do a lot of walking around town, and I recommend that you should think about doing that, too. Walking has lots of benefits.
Because I have gotten used to walking around town, I have begun developing the idea that one of these days I'll attempt the Camino de Santiago. My son, and Katherine Beiers, former Mayor of City of Santa Cruz, have each, and independently, done the Camino. So, quite recently, has former Santa Cruz Mayor Chris Krohn. But that walk, of course, is in a completely different category from the kind of walks I take.
Still, though the Camino would be a genuine challenge, nothing could compare to the walk out of Africa taken by the earliest humans, right? But.... nobody's trying to do that now, right?
Not right!
As it turns out, someone named Paul Salopek, born in Barstow, California, in 1962, is making an attempt to duplicate that trek out of Africa, taken by those first humans. It's a walk that is more than 20,000 miles long. The Camino de Santiago takes thirty-five days. Salopek's walk was estimated to take seven years, and it has actually taken longer, at least partly because Salopek suspended his walk during the Covid pandemic.
I found out about Salopek from article in Emergence Magazine, which was titled, "A Path Older Than Memory." Salopek spoke with the magazine from China.
I was alerted to this article by an email bulletin from Strong Towns, which keeps me posted on key land use and development issues. The bulletin from Strong Towns had some good thoughts about walking, besides tipping me off to the article in Emergence. Here is what that bulletin said:
What’s the connection between great walking and great writing? The poet William Wordsworth is estimated to have walked 180,000 miles, many of them in England’s Lake District. Virginia Woolf roamed London at night. (She wrote an essay about “street haunting.”) Thoreau wasn’t satisfied if he didn’t spend at least four hours a day walking the hills, fields, and forests around Concord, Massachusetts. Nietzsche said “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” and Kierkegaard [said] that “I have walked myself into my best thoughts.”This week I read an interview with Paul Salopek, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is now 11 years into a walking journey that retraces the migrations of our ancient human ancestors. In January 2013, Salopek set out from the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia on his Out of Eden Walk. He is now in northeastern China. He hopes to walk to the southern tip of South America, which he expects to take at least another three years. In the interview, Salopek, now a National Geographic Fellow, talks lyrically about what the best walking and the best writing have in common, including a loving attentiveness: “[If] we stay sedentary, we get scales over our eyes, and we stop realizing the wonders of the everyday world around us because they become over familiar. But walking peels those scales off and allows you to rediscover the extraordinariness of so-called ordinary things. And that includes a walk through your town, a stroll out into the fields, or a park near your house—indeed, your backyard…” [Emphasis Added]
I recommend walking - to everyone. And, of course, you could rely on my personal example and advice. I think it's fair to suggest, however, that Salopek is an even more reliable and more informed source than I am. Here are his thoughts, from the end of his interview with Emergence. Salopek has some advice for every one of us, we who are part of the "sedentary tribe":
I had to pause for a couple months in Beijing, a very big city, to do some research and to write. And so I rented a small, little flat in a hutong, an alleyway in an old part of the city. And so I joined the sedentary tribe, the majoritarian tribe, those two months. I was sitting in front of a laptop. I did what you and probably hundreds of millions of other urbanites do every day—there was a time of the day where I just needed to take a walk. And I could structure that walk to the local market. It doesn’t have to be far. And I can slip into the rewards of using this astonishing internal metronome that’s built inside of us, inside of our body, that distinguishes us from almost every other animal, within five hundred meters, right? And so that was enough to kind of refresh my day, to be able to go back in front of the work. And I think we all know of friends and colleagues who incorporate a little walking into their commute, right? Let’s say you have to jump on a metro, but you walk to and from the metro, or during your lunch hour, you take a spin around the park and sit in the park. I think these micro-migrations are just as potent and valid, if we can access them. It would help if there’s a little quiet that you’re walking through or to, but you can access this goodness that’s kind of humming in our bones, waiting to be let out (emphasis added).
Take Salopek's advice. Peel off those scales that are covering your eyes. Access the goodness that is humming in our bones. Rediscover the extraordinariness of so-called ordinary things:
Take A Walk
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