It’s a great art to saunter! Henry David Thoreau

In the early mornings, I walk along a rural road near our house. At times, I’ve embarked upon my walks as exercise, tried to pick up the pace and power walk my way to a healthy elevated heart-rate. As the sun rose, I pumped my arms and moved with purpose. A conqueror of the road, each step an accomplishment in its own right. But on most days, I’ve failed. I’m not a power walker. I’m a saunterer.

To know that I’m in good company–perhaps the greatest company–gives me courage and inspiration. I imagine myself learning the great art of sauntering from the likes of Thoreau, my father, and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who writes:

Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.

This is it exactly: to walk yourself into a state of well-being, into your best thoughts. Like the great saunterers before me, and those that will inevitably come after me, I’ve learned that there is a mysterious and undeniable connection between my feet and my brain. Interestingly enough, executive editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly studied ants and discovered that when it comes to walking, most of the ant’s thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It’s distributed. It’s in its legs. I’ve long thought that my thinking and decision-making may be as much in my legs as in my brain. For as I’ve walked, as I’ve heard and felt the rhythm of my feet on gravel, I’ve come to simply be. And during these times of simple being, words, images, and sometimes complete thoughts have washed over and through me. These are gifts of immeasurable worth, mysteries of great sauntering.

Father of Virginia Woolf, English author and mountaineer Leslie Stephen writes:

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.

As a saunterer, I like the idea of turning my intellect out to play for a season. Too often, I feel constricted by an intellect at work. I long to play, long to throw syllogisms and every analytical compulsion to the wind. Loosed then, I could walk and send my intellect into the fields that have been overtaken by sunflowers. Here, amidst thousands of bright blooms, one can do some serious playing.

Naturalist John Muir saw the holiness of sauntering. He writes:

I don’t like either the word [hike] or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not ‘hike!’ Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre’, ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.

Mountains or plains, forests or fields, we ought to saunter through them reverently. Sauntering is walking on holy ground. A single thrush, a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace, a copse of willows–all sing the abiding songs of creation. Each morning, I pilgrimage To the Holy Land and count my blessings as the road unfolds before me.

Backpacker and writer Colin Fletcher is best known for his book The Complete Walker. In it, he writes:

Frankly, I fail to see how going for a six-month, thousand-mile walk through deserts and mountains can be judged less real than spending six months working eight hours a day, five days a week, in order to earn enough money to be able to come back to a comfortable home in the evening and sit in front of a TV screen and watch the two-dimensional image of some guy talking about a book he has written on a six-month, thousand-mile walk through deserts and mountains.

I confess that I have often regarded my morning walks with the prospect of productivity. After I walk, I say to myself, I will accomplish something: clean the house, write a poem, something, anything. Foolishly, I have regarded walking as a warm-up, a preamble to something productive. But Fletcher’s words humble me, for the walk itself is no less valuable or worthy of my time than writing about it later. The walk is the thing, the only thing. Sauntering for its own sake is golden.

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility. Poet Gary Snyder celebrates the balance of heartiness and soul, spirit and humility that great saunterers may experience. My hair unwashed, my eyes rimmed with yesterday’s mascara, I often put my most humble self on the road each morning. Stripped of most pretenses, I walk and sweat. Unadorned and alone, I saunter unabashedly into the day. I like to think that this sauntering self is my best self and that early morning meditations are my best prayers.

Thoreau understood the great art of sauntering and claimed to have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who have understood the art of Walking, that is of taking walks,–who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.

Some mornings, I feel as though his eyes are upon me, the master saunterer looking fondly down on his fledgling. I plan to be a saunterer worthy of Thoreau’s classification of genius. And if I begin to power walk or plan my week, I’ll slow to a saunter, humbled and inspired by all those who walk for its own glorious sake.