Reflections
Talk the Talk
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Examining the links between livetheflow and walking
I am grateful to Rebecca Solnit for expressing ideas that were perhaps already developing in my sub-consciousness. I came across her book “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”. I was enthralled by her first chapter. She has an great gift for verbalising the profound.
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Solnit observes that modern life tends to be a lived in series of disconnected boxes. She believes that technology makes this worse by ‘minimising the unstructured travel time’ between the boxes. Yes, we are more efficient and productive, but the destination rather than the journey is all. We are left in a disconnected world obsessed with speed and immediacy.
Solnit commends walking because it makes our world more connected. Her words quoted below are so much better than mine. There is a profound relationship between Livetheflow and the ideas she expresses.
It is for you to reflect.
"Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors – home, car, gym, office, shops – disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than interiors built up against it."
"I like walking because it is slow and I suspect that the mind, like the feet works at about three miles an hour. If this is so then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness."
"New time saving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them."
The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you do not know you are looking for, and you don't know a place till it surprises you. Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against this erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape and the city. Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
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Since Solnit wrote 'Wanderlust' in 2000 the technology of everyday life has made another quantum leap for most people. It is a development that one would have thought to be liberating in the extreme. This is the box you are in now: the screen. In a strange way this screen box has enveloped and permeated all the other boxes that Solnit identifies.
It has become the first box on waking and the last before sleeping. It has added volume to events and to the breakneck speed of life. It is an irony that often the things that should make us free have enormous potential for doing the opposite.
This new technology gives a prophetic meaning to the Solnit quotation above: "The random, the unscreened allows you to find what you do not know you are looking for ...." Our journey in 'the flow' can mean being caught up at times in the frenzy of all these boxes but in a way that they do not own us. Ultimately there is a different agenda, direction and purpose. There is time and space for the journey.
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"Walking is a subversive detour,
the scenic route through a half abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences."