walking – Observations and Misunderstandings

We’re living in strange times. It’s Thursday today if anyones curious I discovered this earlier, I lost a day, somehow it isn’t Wednesday. Isn’t it great when we realise how little the structure of the week matters and how it isn’t actually real. Once Sunday needed to exist so we could all go to church and pretend we liked God, or use Sunday to rest from the drudgery of our failed work life balance. If God can rest then so can you. Then it appeared God developed a drinking habit because we all started needing it for enduring hangovers.

Some disgusting and healthy members of society of course love posing for photos with their dogs on hills but thankfully these freaks seem to keep to themselves whenever possible. Especially now the Police drones are after them, not to mention those machines they use to film them from the air. Now well, who knows, currently Sunday doesn’t really exist unless we take Don’t Call The Midwife or Dr Who seriously and I have no idea whether they’re even on anymore. I doubt anyone does now that we have tigers and murderers online. These days it’s anything and everything whenever we feel in the mood, porn at the drop of a hat.

And no football of course. Clubs, organisations and fans all trying to juggle the moral dilemma of how they can get the entertainment they want even though it will be like a shit training match in an empty stadium. One which must be shown as nobody wants to repay the billion pounds the sports channels pay to prop up the footballers lifestyles. Don’t forget social distancing. Two metres at all times. Gives a new meaning to contact sport.

Seventy-one year Prince Charles has recovered in a few days from his bout of the virus. It appears that while healthy twenty year old are keeling over, the old reptilian blood is still pumping. If madness, syphilis and inbreeding doesn’t take them down, you bet a little cough won’t even register. Doesn’t say much for his relationship with his wife Camilla though if she didn’t test positive. That or it doesn’t say much for this virus. I still fully admit to being completely confused by everything that is going on.

I have a healthy instinct to not trust the actions of my government or the bellowing of the media but people are dying. I don’t know how old they are because unless you’re young they don’t seem to report or give any kind of average age. For perspective people are still dying more from alcohol related illnesses each day but they insist the bottle shops are ‘essential’ and even more again are dying from smoking related illnesses but this is still highly legal. Let’s not even start on suicides, and don’t even dare mention the probable increase in suicides when people realise they have no future now that their businesses won’t stay open and they can’t feed their kids on £94 per week let alone pay off their toilet roll debts. But then the figures would be much worse if we didn’t have a lockdown and it has most likely stemmed the spread of the virus to a degree. I just don’t know anything. Everything is unknown right now. What an interesting moment in our evolutionary existence.

It is good to see the government admit after ten years of saying cuts are the only solution to saving the economy and society that no actually spending billions we don’t have apparently is instead. And don’t forget to clap your local nurse who you actively voted against by voting in this shower of incompetent, corrupt and dithering shite last December. Yes you fuckwit, you’re a hypocrite and you’re stupid. But anyway as I said strange times.

I read an article this morning about walking. It was reasonably interesting and revolved around some of the greatest minds of the past two hundred years being avid walkers. Henry David Thoreau, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud and Mahatma Gandhi apparently all loved a good walk and it wasn’t suggested that their achievements were down to their ability to walk but did suggest there was a link between their understanding of being able to put down the pen and getting the blood flowing with a stroll. This is by no means a new revelation, anyone who has sat in front of a screen or studied for too long has felt heavy, groggy and the necessity of movement to make them feel alive again. The point the article attempted to make was that in this day and age in which there needs to be a purpose behind everything we do; we have simply forgotten the art of simply existing. There is something cleansing about simply being in a moment of purposeless purpose that we cannot get when we’re walking from A to B to either count the steps it’s taken us to get there or because any other method of movement is not possible. The relation to Sisyphus in our effort to get to B before discovering we almost immediately need to get on to C and then D afterwards.

However it does neglect to mention that these great minds most likely understood the benefit of taking time for a stroll for their minds and the furthering of ideas they had perhaps started to stagnate on. To imagine while walking they weren’t thinking through various angles to problems is to misunderstand the mind. In that case it is quite easy to suggest they were never strolling for the sake of it existence in that moment because there was a purpose behind it, even if that was just to clear their mind there was purpose. We may live in an age were everything needs a purpose that can be monetised, and while that is soon to be found out as flawed over the next few months, that doesn’t mean people simply existed previously. Perhaps we just don’t know how to relate to the workings of their alien thought process and minds.

Saying all of that though it is entirely acceptable to suggest we could do with a little more strolling in life. To experience life for the sake of mere existence. How that can relate to people being stuck inside their homes in quarantine I’m unsure but I suspect there may just be a new age of appreciation for the simple art of walking as people find satisfaction once more in the stroll. Any excuse for getting out of the house and absorbing a bit of vitamin D. Don’t forget the two metres of course.

Tag: walking

To Stroll For Strolling's Sake