Walking as Inactivity
Commonplace Newsletter #115
Sunday. The day of rest. I’m down by the Quayside, walking. It’s near lunchtime and the walkways on either side of the water’s edge are teeming with couples and clusters of families, both on foot and on pushbikes. There are pedaloes cutting through the still water and waitresses running out trays of tall lattes to eager pensioners nestled under the parasols jutting out from the centre of round metal tables. Beyond them a seersuckered trad jazz band blow away to the mild delight of a smattering of swaying onlookers. The sun is out, the sky is clear and blue and the breeze is a gentle comfort against the heat. And yet something isn’t quite right. Despite the day, despite the time of year and the favourable, couldn’t-be-better weather there is a tension here, just below the surface.
I stroll the banks but I am the only one who is strolling. As I amble and look and linger at the sight of various waterbirds I am overtaken time and again. I watch the cable ferry for a minute, I contemplate the various centuries old brick buildings and imagine what this place would’ve been like when it was a place of sail ships and exchange and empire. And I am overtaken and overtaken as if there were a minimum speed limit that I was flagrantly disrespecting by moving so slowly. See, though this is a place of leisure and today is the designated day of rest people are marching purposefully as if they have somewhere else to be. Rigid gait, eyes on the path ahead, stimulant of choice at hand- either takeaway coffee or sickly sweet cake or both, while some of the university age walkers forgo these and instead blow vape-pen clouds into the cloudless sky. There is something going on here. Am I the only one who knows how to bimble, how to promenade, how to saunter? Is this now a lost art? And if so, what does this mean, what does this say about us and the way we are living?
The vital thing to understand- and the point that I want to stress the most- is that walking is not an activity. Or rather, it should not be conceptualised as and reduced to being a mere activity. It is much more than that because it is much less than that. Walking is one of the great forms of inactivity and in a world of striving and consumerism and grasping and impatience it is one of only very few potential forms of inactivity left. It is that makes it precious.
You see, when you walk slowly and with no real destination in mind you are not doing, you are just being. Such walking, such contemplation is the beginning of freedom, it is the necessary pre-condition for having your own thoughts and as such for truly living your own life.
Which is why it is such a shame when people pollute their potentially edifying walks by turning to their ever-present phones. When I walk the streets and alleys of my city I constantly see people either shouting inanities into their phones1 or else using them to wirelessly pump music or podcasts into their eager ears. Walking thus becomes reduced to a mere mode of transportation for the carless and these reluctant pedestrians become- like so many other one-person-per-vehicle drivers- detached and isolated units moving through space2. The audio and the journeying cancel each other out and it all bleeds into one, it becomes a blur that blots out the boredom of not being at your destination yet. Worse still is when this is combined with step counting apps or wristwatches which tragically instrumentalise the beautiful art of wandering around and turn walking into a metricated means of merely keeping the body alive and in some sort of working order. Such devices reduce us to machines, and one of the great tricks of Capitalism or The System or however you want to conceive it is that it not only turns us into machines for consumption and generating wealth for The Economy, but it also burdens us with the upkeep of the machinery that we have been reduced to becoming.
It reminds me of the great rant that the anarchist Bob Black got into about free time in his seminal essay The Abolition of Work3
“Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don’t do that. Lathes and typewriters don’t do that.”
When you start tracking your step count when you go for your daily constitutional you turn the walk into ‘free time’ in this sense. It becomes an Activity, something that is Good For You. And this only compounds if you listen to some manner of Educational Podcast as you do so. The thrillingly, daringly subversive non-activity of moseying around the neighbourhood for no reason other than the sheer pleasure of being alive, able to walk and out of doors degenerates into just another means of being visibly productive. Because eking out maximum amounts of productivity from every moment of our days has been working out so great for us thus far. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and we are all so play-deprived that many of us are becoming passive, disembodied viewers of our own on-screen lives.
It may seem that I am getting worked up about a series of trivialities here. To point out how people turn their recreational activities into photoshoots of themselves acting out their recreational activities may strikes some as petty. To highlight the ubiquitous phones and SUVs that people use to transport them the short distances to and from the walking spots may even seem a little mean spirited. Like I am nit-picking relatively unimportant and unremarkable things to try and find some significance in them. But I truly think that there is a lot more going on here. Everyday things are worthy of serious consideration because they are so common and unremarked upon.
So what does it say then when walking- something that is already complete and requires no thought or effort or expense- is polluted and diminished into just another opportunity to consume and document said consumption? What does it say when we so thoughtlessly desecrate our leisure like this? I would argue that to do these things is more than a little dehumanising.
Animals survive and act and react but only humans can opt out of this cycle and into the higher realm of inactivity. Just as silences make music more beautiful and pauses make conversations richer in meaning, it is inactivity- that is the moving beyond doing into being- that makes life human. Responding to stimuli alone, satisfying needs as they arise alone makes life nothing more than a cycle of biological survival.
The beauty is in the gaps. Art and culture arise from the blank spaces (which may be why these vital spheres in particular seem to be diminishing in this time of always on, always available activity). Uselessness and purposelessness4 are true luxury, true wealth. Look at any heart-stirring ceremony or custom or event- they are filled with detours and excesses, they are far from efficient. You could easily workshop a way of getting to the same basic endpoint much, much quicker and in doing so you would kill everything that made that ceremony unique and beautiful and, well, ceremonial.
The luxury of the aimless walk is one of the most accessible and readily available blank spaces we have. It is no coincidence that such a stroll will all of itself produce ideas and insights and new observations. In the absence of a task the mind will begin to play. It will be free. This is why walking and creativity go absolutely hand in hand. Insight comes to the contemplative and contemplation comes from inactivity, from not trying to generate insights, or indeed trying to do much of anything at all. In a try-hard world this is a difficult truth to convince people of. Because it asks for patience. It asks for more than mere effort. It asks for participation in the world as it is, which for the mind that has always trained itself to be busy is a big ask indeed. But it is the only way to be free.
One thing I have observed in recent years is how the fashion of holding phones has changed. Before people would hold their phone to their ears the same as they would their landline handset at home. But now- presumably on the back of news getting around that holding cellular phones to your ear causes brain tumours or other such damage- people hold the phones into their upturned palm like an obsequious waiter delivering the bill and shout into them from distance. As with all fashions a few people slowly adopted this before it suddenly taking off all at once. The strange thing is, is that no one seems even slightly annoyed that this apparently ‘recent’ consequential health information was included within the iPhone 4 manual nearly 15 years ago.
With these vehicles getting noticeably larger, taller and more insulated with every passing year. Often meaning 2- 3 tonnes to transport one person from the suburbs into and around town. This is madness. Will people just buy anything they’re told to?
Is this even a word?
Insightful essay and as usual the work is crowned by the footnotes. A few dovetails:
1. Semi-recently a bevy of "be more productive"/econ writers like Amos Tversky and Kahneman have been immense advocates for the creative ideas generated by walking. However, don't let the sacredness and ceremony of walking be corrupted by entering the task with the "goal" of solving your thesis, or some other problem at hand. It will destroy the moment, and make it bland and stale. Go for a walk for the "being" or the "gap" as you correctly intuit Thomas.
2. To really "feel" the gap and for walking to be a distinct and wonderful realm, you have to learn to be comfortable, not antsy, with just hearing your own thoughts for more than 45 seconds. No ear buds, No wristwatch/smart watch. Just you and your thoughts. For people less than 45, you will look for stimulus...something, anything other than that odd voice, your voice....after a few minutes, but persevere. Ironically, the work is really in doing nothing. As I so often paraphrase Sherry Turkle, " If you never learn to be alone, then you will always be alone." Walking is a prime way to authentically learn to be alone, and I mean a pre-Internet form of authentic, not the watered down current version used to attact and dilate pupils.
Keep walking properly Thomas and thanks for resurrecting this activity. Amble on!
Thank you for this. For the last few years I've been dealing with somewhat limited mobility -- first it was my hip that was borked, and then my knee, and then I got a hip replacement, and now I'm waiting for a replacement of the bad knee. All of which has severely impacted the joy I used to take in simply wandering my city (London). It's been hugely depressing, and even though I know it is temporary (I WILL be back to my old self in the not-too-distant future), I am profoundly missing the very joys you have described here. I will never take it for granted again.