The sun
burns when it is not hiding in the clouds. The tree tops protect the sidewalks
below from the rain. The trails are deep and steep, narrow and long. The
sun-bathers prepare to pound he boardwalks, in preparation for the final days
of summer. Like seabirds, families congregate in front of the ponds, wanting to
soak in the last details of the water and the sunshine.
The
smell of barbecue hearkens to earlier times: the days when the kids would stay
out all day, while parents didn’t have to worry over their whereabouts. Seeing
kids splashing through Lake Ontario restores my faith that the water is not as
polluted as rumours say that it is. And the loving fathers kiss their daughters
as they return with scraped knees and mud-caked hands, needing just the care to
know that their bodies are safe and resilient. And the cycle of the day goes
by, with the whirring hums of the nearby airshow to enthrall everyone. It seems
a beautiful day to finish the summer.
Walking
seems like such an innocent thing to do, but what does it teach me? What do I
learn from this simple movement? One thing that I learn about is that the flesh
and blood body has its strengths and its limits. One doesn’t really test the
limits of how far one can walk unless one actually walks. There is even
metaphor, “walk the talk”, which suggests that walking embodies the real
distances that talk only imagines. I can say that I am capable of travelling so
much of a distance, but only through real distance can I really know what my
body is capable of. Walking also becomes a contemplative relationship with the
body, the sounds, and the environment. Walking stirs up memories, sensations,
and resistance as well. But it can be meditative. When I am tired or sore from
walking, my temptation might be to rest or to quit altogether, but what happens
when I stay with it? It goes away, and eventually leads to joy again. In this
way, I learn about the body’s capacity for cycling and endless renewal, instead
of treating the body as one upward progression.
Walking
is also an exercise in learning interconnection, through witnessing it in the
things around me. The social role of the walker is unique, in the sense that it
is transient, and never stays in one place at any given time. Walking long
distance can displace identities from their comfortable, familiar ‘psycho-geographies’,
and re-orient them to unfamiliar psychic spaces. It can also disorient a person
from the familiar, static social roles that keep a person fixed to a few
routine locations, such as the office, home and the supermarket. The discomfort
of dislocation might yield to a sense of wonder, or wondering (or wandering) as
to who one really is, and this might lead one to expand the familiar roles of
lifestyles of one’s habitual sense of location. At the same time as being a
transient identity, the walker is free to stop anywhere and connect with nature
and people. In a sense, walking embodies the value of the wandering soul, in
search of ways to endlessly re-approach the same pathways, using new
perspectives, lenses and connections to invigorate the journey. But walking in
the city adds the notion that wandering does not isolate people from
communities, but actually allows people to reconnect with the unknown parts of
the city and discover new acquaintances. Walking can be an act of transgressing,
crossing invisible boundaries between neighbourhoods that are not connected to
each other.
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