[philosophies of walking: in preparation for the IoCT walk]

I'm sitting at my laptop feeling guilty in a sedentary sort of way, but instantly cheered up as I remember that on Thursday, from 1:00-2:00, is the IoCT walk. Anyone linked with the IoCT is welcome to join us for a walk which lasts about 40 minutes and takes us off the University campus to stroll along the banks of the Union Canal. Wondering why the prospect of this group amble would bring such a sense of calm to my demenour led me to google "walking." Somewhat serendipitously I found a group based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Walking as Knowing as Making group consider kinetic activity as part and parcel of any synaptic activity. One of the "walkers," David Macauley, has written a humourous view of the philosophies of walking. So foot-ist is he, his essay is composed only of footnotes with "handnotes" detailing any references. One interesting footnote:

11. But in idleness we are in danger of losing our sense of depth; we are taken out of the thick of things. The horizon flattens. Walking puts things back into perspective. Spacial, placial and qualitative changes occur. Distances and measurements, too, have historically been associated with the walking body - eg. the foot or the mile (from mille, a thousand paces) or the foot-candle. Pace, naturally, is important to perspective and is what distinguishes running, in part, from walking. When running distances of more than 20 miles I have occasionally been taken out of my body and its perspective - I begin to disassociate - or in better moments, lose myself in the rhythm. In our walks, we must try to harmonize body-mind - environment. We should be alarmed, as Thoreau was, when the body has walked a mile but the spirit is still loitering at the doorstep or the library.

Perhaps this is why I enjoy the IoCT walk; it offers an opportunity to other rhythms for a while. As Francesco Careri describes it, walking becomes "an architecture of landscape." The IoCT walks are storytelling in motion. For some of us, the walk offers stimulus for narratives, for others, the walk itself is the unfolding of narrative.