A new form of social tyranny has broken out. Opposition to it seems churlish and unsporting. Refusal risks offence.
Other than actual or feigned injury or bad weather, there is truly no escape.
I am speaking of the invitation that seems to arrive with everincreasing frequency from acquaintances, clients and colleagues: Do you want to take a walk with me?
My answer is, in almost every case, no. I would not like to take a walk with you.
Don’t get me wrong. I love walking. I am a Goldmanite, so I walk every day, several times a day.
With my kids in the park first thing in the morning.
To the supermarket, office or school. And I am hardly a misanthrope.
I love a coffee date or meeting for lunch.
I’ll happily do drinks, soft or hard, depending on the mood and the hour.
Or meet for a chat on a bench.
I had a classic millennial childhood that hovered just on the edge between free range and outright neglect.
With my parents hardly ever around, I was expected, from quite a young age, to make myself scarce from home and find my entertainment.
While other kids were sweating over multiplication tables, I was under an old steel bridge, hustling.
I’d count change, work out prices and figure out which buyers would pay the most for poultry and vegetables —anything to avoid another mind-numbing class.
Most days, it was just me, trekking from one village to the next, tallying costs and profits in my head, all the way to Teng Bukap.
This was the 1990s, long before we could carry thousands of digitised songs in our pockets, and podcasts, of course, did not exist.
Lacking a Walkman, I had nothing but my thoughts to keep me company on these rambles, and my young, plastic mind formed indelible grooves and associations.
Like most humans, I am a terrible multitasker. Invite me on a walk and I will struggle to keep up my end of the conversation because my brain cannot unlearn that walking time is thinking time, my mind wandering as widely and aimlessly as my feet.
It was the early 2010s: Sitting (once a comfort I associated with the pleasure of reading) was suddenly considered as bad as smoking (once a pleasure I associated with … pleasure).
Walking, or ‘getting your steps in,’ would lower cholesterol, forestall diabetes and improve your memory.
The innovation gurus of Silicon Valley were coming up with wild new ideas that transformed our economy, powered by new ways of working — open office plans that supposedly encouraged collaboration and playful workplace amenities like PingPong tables.
And of course, walks.
Apple founder Steve Jobs set the blueprint.
He loved a walking meeting and his endless imitators adopted the habit.
I tried mightily to get on board with this trend, especially in the formative years I spent as a quantitative analyst.
But I never got the hang of the walk and talk.
Years of training my mind to pay attention while still and wander while wandering proved impossible to dislodge.
Even passive listening kills the vibe.
Gripped by the mania for optimisation, I used to try to fill my walking time with podcasts and audiobooks.
But over time I find that I do less and less of that, in no small part because I often struggle to pay attention to what I’m listening to.
I do appreciate the arguments in favour of walking and talking.
Walking is good for you. Some people find it easier to talk to someone while engaged in another activity.
This seems true for my wife —whether she’s consulting with her patients while prescribing medications or pacing alongside her colleagues while fielding phone calls.
My theory is that she has been socialised to feel comfortable either making one-on-one eye contact or avoiding it altogether.
A walk is a way to meet someone without consuming things (coffee, alcohol and food being the most popular choices) and without creating the obligation to provide hospitality in your home.
I have a special exception to my general rule for parents of young children, for whom a walk while pushing a slumbering infant in a stroller is a rare chance to connect with a grown-up.
And of course, a spontaneous walk with a close friend — someone with whom you have a genuine, intimate relationship — can be a joy.
And yet, taking a walk with someone you don’t know that well feels, to me at least, a bit like a forced march into intimacy or an unwanted conscription of a treasured morsel of leisure into our obsession with productivity and self-improvement.
Even the arguments for the creative benefits of walking can fall into this trap.
Fans of walks love to point out that Virginia Woolf dreamed up ‘To the Lighthouse’ on a walk around Tavistock Square. Insomniac walks through London powered Charles Dickens’ novels.
An empty mind may be the devil’s workshop, at least according to Puritans, but it is also the birthplace of creativity, the spark that gave us the fire of Prometheus.
Iconic stories like Archimedes in a bathtub or Newton under an apple tree get all the attention, but many more scientists have had their Eureka moments while on long, solitary rambles.
Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote that only those thoughts that came from walking had any value. Sure.
But the magic lies not in the end result but in the activity itself. In her book ‘Wanderlust,’ Rebecca Solnit captures solitary ambling perfectly: “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.
Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.” Writer Teju Cole often gets invited to take walks, because his luminous novel, ‘Open City,’ is filled with looping, interminable walks.
But he usually demurs.
“Really, what I love more than walking itself is getting lost,” he said in a podcast.
“And getting lost with someone else in tow is difficult.
This might be why my favourite walks have been in solitude and in cities with which I am unfamiliar.
One evening a few years ago, in the throes of jet lag, I set out from my Paris hotel without a map and without a phone, and I simply walked, for almost four hours.
It remains my most memorable experience of that city.”
But even in your neighbourhood, solitude rules.
Or so Colson Whitehead, novelist and walker, said of his peregrinations.
“Walking is very much a solo pursuit for me,” he said.
“But I never feel alone because I have company — I’m walking with, not through, the city.”
Walking is a rare moment in our modern life where we can just let our mind wander.
Aimless walking is a lost art in our ever-optimising society.
So let’s meet for coffee. I’m sure I’ll come up with lots of fun things to talk about on the walkover.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
