A self-declared fast walker, Ruby is learning to slowen her pace on the trail, with hopes it will translate to the rest of her life.

 

I’ve always been a fast hiker. I love charging up mountains and across desert plains, settling into a pace that could be categorised as a light jog. When I hiked the 14-day Larapinta Trail, I packed walkie-talkies to ensure I could maintain my speed, often finding myself 5km in front of my walking mate and blissfully unaware of the fact. 

I’ve been told that walking is meditative, that you can find a rhythm, and in that rhythm, your mind can quieten and the noise of the everyday can lose its weight. 

An Eskimo custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of their system in a straight line across the landscape. The point at which anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength of rage.

This makes sense to me.

You walk and walk and walk until the chains have been lifted until you realise that your rage is actually grief and that you’re surrounded by beauty: the wind, the birds, the flowers that grow between the crevices of boulders. And the perspective nourishes you and allows you to return home regulated.

 

Reaching this state of being is fairly foreign to me. I know that when I’m charging, I’m not at peace. It’s like I’m in a race, or experiencing some kind of emergency. Go, go, go, get to the end, back to the start, to camp, to the water! If the Eskimo custom was afforded to me, maybe I’d walk and walk and walk and never come back. 

Of course, this happens in my day-to-day life, too. Powering through the city streets, sighing when I pass someone who decided to text while walking up a flight of stairs, grunting when I’m stuck behind someone who doesn’t understand ‘Keep left unless overtaking’. 

In recent years, one of the things I’ve been committing to is learning how to move a little slower. 

To pause and take three breaths when I can feel myself upping the pace on a trail. To visit an ‘unremarkable’ place and just sit on the ground and look at the trees. To keep the earphones in the backpack, the phone on silent.  

The other day, I was reading Wanderlust, by Rebecca Solnit, a book on the history of walking. The time spent walking, she notes, ‘has been deplored as a waste, reduced, and its remainder filled with earphones playing music and mobile phones relaying conversations. The very ability to appreciate the uncluttered time, the uses of the useless, often seems to be evaporating, as does appreciation of being outside – including outside the familiar; mobile phone conversations seem to serve as a buffer against solitude, silence, and encounters with the unknown.’ 

This book, and this paragraph particularly, served as a helpful reminder. 

 

 

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed as I’ve been learning to walk slowly is that I no longer need the great, sweeping adventures I once did. I no longer need the views and the mind-blowing moments. Because I’m learning to see them in front of me, in smaller spaces. And I’m learning to see the art of walking, as the point itself. 

I wouldn’t write a story about the local park or even the local fire trail. It’s not exciting enough. But it can be just as nourishing. Just as good for the body and mind, when we slow down and notice the beauty, right there in front of us. 

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