Free A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros Page B

the watchful bird, the streamlet finding its course – without expecting anything. Walking makes the rumours and complaints fall suddenly silent, stops the ceaseless interior chatter through which we comment on others, evaluate ourselves, recompose, interpret. Walking shuts down the sporadic soliloquy to whose surface sour rancours, imbecile satisfactions and easy imaginary vengeances rise sluggishly in turn. You are facing a mountain, walking among great trees, and you think: they are just there. They are there, they didn’t expect me, they were always there. They werethere long before me and they will still be there long after me.
    A day will surely come when we will just stop worrying, stop being taken over and imprisoned by our chores (while knowing very well that we have invented most of them, imposed them on ourselves). Working: accumulating savings, perpetual anxiety not to miss any career opportunity, coveting this or that job, rushing the work, worrying about competitors. Do this, take a look at that, invite so-and-so: social constraints, cultural fashions, busy busy busy … but always to do something, not to ‘be’. We leave that for later: there’s always something better, more urgent, more important to be done now. Being can wait until tomorrow. But tomorrow brings chores for the day after … An endless tunnel. And they call it living. So pervasive is the pressure that even leisure carries the stamp of single-mindedness: sport carried to painful extremes, stimulant relaxations, costly dinners, active nights, expensive holidays. Until finally the only way out seems to be through melancholia or death.
    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. So that walking, by unburdening us, prising us from the obsession with doing, puts us in touch with that childhood eternity once again. I mean that walking is so to speak child’s play. To marvel at the beauty of the day, the brightness of the sun, the grandeur of the trees, the blue of the sky: to do that takes no experience, no ability. It istherefore sensible, incidentally, to distrust people who walk too much and too far: they have already seen everything and only make comparisons. The eternal child is one who has never seen anything so beautiful, because he doesn’t compare. So when we set off for a few days, a few weeks, we are not just leaving behind our jobs, neighbours, affairs, habits and troubles; but also our complicated identities, our faces and masks. None of that can hold for long, because walking never calls for anything but the body. None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests.
    You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze. Emerson wrote:
    I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.… There I feel that nothing can befall me in life – no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes) which nature cannot repair.Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air, and