Walk About It
Modernist writer Virginia Woolf loved her wintery night walks. Henry David Thoreau found walking to be a unification between his soul and nature, a metaphysical exercise of such. But it was Ernest Hemingway, ol' Hem, who was the real OG of the pack.
City lights, city nights. I walk and great thoughts are realized.
Quote
“Walking through the city streets, is it by mistake or design?” - Lana Del Rey
Long solitary walks. Brisk walks with a buddy. Meditative walks that eventually transport your mind out of the future and back to the present. Walks with a skip of joy after your first kiss. A walking meeting at work because you need to zone out before you can Zoom in. Mission walks with the dog, and the list goes on.
Walking is like breathing. We do it without realizing it, but when it is manipulated in some way or another we suddenly become aware of it. It’s so built into our daily lives that do we ever sit down and think, wow what a beautiful blessing it is to walk one foot in front of the other? We gasp at a baby’s first step, laugh when we trip over a crack in the sidewalk, beam with enthusiasm when we step out onto a stage, and hold back tears when taking those orchestrated steps toward the altar of love.
But do we ever stop and thank the universal force that made us bump into that person, our person, on that one random day, or the wrong turn we took that turned out to be the right one for so many other reasons or those tourists that were walking in a row of four down 6th Avenue in Manhattan forcing us to slow down and take a deep breath. We didn’t have any place to be anyhow, it was just an automatic impulse to rush.
Walking comes in mysterious ways.
