What Can Rousseau Teach us About Walking
Walking is natural for a human being the same as breathing. We take a walk to go to the nearest store, we sometimes walk to work, we take a walk when we are feeling anxious, and we sometimes walk to forget our problems.
I personally love to walk, and not just any walks, but long walks. One definition says about walking: “an act of traveling or an excursion on foot”. That’s what I enjoyed in walking. I love to travel and do some excursions mostly on foot particularly in the streets of Metro Manila, especially in Manila’s Intramuros, Makati, and in Quezon city where I could just ramble and lost in my own thoughts. On some days I would not think at all and practice mindfulness.
Taking a walk is revitalizing for me. After having a stressful day at work or when I am getting a writer’s block and I can’t think straight, I usually walk it out. Fortunately for me, it works most often.
The Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau was an avid walker too. We think of him only as a man of letters and a key figure of the Enlightenment. In fact, he likes to go on long walks. He even published a book about walking. Walking for him is therapeutic too. More than that, he philosophized walking. “I have never thought so much, existed so much, lived so much, been so much myself… as in the journeys which I have made alone and on foot,” he opined.
Rousseau walks mercilessly. Back then, walking was not a choice it’s the only way to get to the destination besides the carriages, but he loathed taking carriages. There was a time where he walked six miles from Paris to Vincennes just to visit his imprisoned friend Denis Diderot. For him, it’s a usual thing to do.
Come to think of it, there were no asphalt roads only dirt roads. It’s unlucky when it’s wet season, the roads are full of puddles of mud. There are no running shoes or outfits for running either. He only wears long coats and heels. Imagine how Rousseau is managing in those kinds of conditions yet he still loves walking.
But there’s an absolutely different experience when walking because you are experiencing a different kind of thoughts like a stream of consciousness bringing you back and forth; through space and time, and a nonlinear chain of events or recollections while you are headed for your destination.
“No wonder so many philosophers walked. Socrates, of course, liked nothing more than strolling in the agora. Nietzsche regularly embarked on spirited two-hour jaunts in the Swiss Alps, convinced “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Thomas Hobbes had a walking stick custom made with a portable inkwell attached so he could record his thoughts as he ambled. Thoreau regularly took four-hour treks across the Concord countryside, his capacious pockets overflowing with nuts, seeds, flowers, Indian arrowheads, and other treasures. Immanuel Kant, naturally, maintained a highly regimented walking routine. Every day, he’d eat lunch at 12:45 p.m., then depart for a one-hour constitutional — never more, never less — on the same boulevard in Königsberg, Prussia (now Russia). So unwavering was Kant’s routine that the people of Königsberg set their watches by his perambulations.” An excerpt from Eric Weiner’s In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers.
But of course, nothing compares to Rousseau. “He’d regularly walk twenty miles in a single day. He once walked three hundred miles from Geneva to Paris. It took him two weeks.”
Now that the majority of the people are working from home since the global pandemic upended, I assume that most people are inside their homes and unable to take a stroll in the park or do power walk for exercise because they are afraid. Others are having depression or anxiety because companies laying off and some of them have been asked to resign due to economic crisis.
In these turbulent times, when you are experiencing some mental health problems, or you just want to get away with your problems, or even find a solitary bliss, then go for a walk and practice mindfulness or just wander in your own deep thoughts. For Rousseau, he would just walk it out. “I can only meditate when I am walking, when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.” Even Nietzsche believes that walking is therapeutic saying, “There is more wisdom in your body than in all of your philosophy”.
