If you really want to learn to appreciate slow walks go with a couple of young kids. My wife and go walking most nights after dinner with our two daughters. We call them Zen Walks.
How to Take a Walk
161–170 of 191 posts
Re: How to Take a Walk
#162why walk in the street? I walk in my house everyday, it's save and I can walk naked.
Re: How to Take a Walk
#163“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking”. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
Re: How to Take a Walk
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the UK oddly authoritarian / rigid in many of these ways. My GF and myself decided to go to a lake (actually some kind of reservoir) near London on a hot day a month or two ago, and were rather surprised to find out that the lake closed at 6pm. The very concept of a lake closing, never mind at 6pm on a summer evening (easily light out until 10:30), was alien to my Irish mind. Meanwhile, there was an article in…
Och that Guardian article is getting all in a fluster about "wild camping" being banned in a single location (Loch Lomond) that is near to a major city and is seeing some problems. Just about everywhere else in the Highlands I've never had any problems wild camping or staying in bothies ( http://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/ ).
It links to a different article discussing a camping ban near a large city, but the article itself says "It is currently banned across the vast majority of England and Wales".
Re: How to Take a Walk
#165I started disagreeing with this immediately, since I take walks all the time. But it occurs to me that I do it a lot more now that I've moved to Europe. It's just a lot more walkable here. In Pamplona I could walk out my front door and be blasted with the fact that I was in a medieval walled city with cobbled streets and narrow alleyways. Any direction I went had some guaranteed Cool Stuff to pass by and probably wou…
I agree wholeheartedly that location matters. I just moved to SF from Nebraska. I've 'taken more walks' as described in the article in the last month than I did in the last 3 years since living in SF.
Re: How to Take a Walk
#166I started disagreeing with this immediately, since I take walks all the time. But it occurs to me that I do it a lot more now that I've moved to Europe. It's just a lot more walkable here. In Pamplona I could walk out my front door and be blasted with the fact that I was in a medieval walled city with cobbled streets and narrow alleyways. Any direction I went had some guaranteed Cool Stuff to pass by and probably wou…
I did the opposite. Moved from Spain to California few years ago. I was so shocked for the complete lack of sidewalks on San Francisco's South Bay that I ended up taking a complete collection of pictures about it. It's somewhat common in some areas in the US, and literally unthinkable in Europe. I am lucky that I live in San Francisco now, where most of the city (besides some areas I found between the Sunset and Glen…
San Francisco is a walker's paradise. In particular, there are the off-street stairways that take you to all sorts of interesting nooks and crannies.
There has even been an excellent book published about San Francisco's stairways: Stairway Walks in San Francisco by Adah Bakalinsky. There is also a good web site: http://www.sisterbetty.org/stairways/
Re: How to Take a Walk
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some TV shows might be more worthwhile than building an Eiffel tower out of match sticks.
I am not sure if you are being sarcastic, but I will say I very much doubt it. There are many TV shows I enjoy watching, and a few that are either inspirational or infomrative. But never have I accomplished something by watching TV. Building something, even an Eiffel tower out of match sticks, is accomplishing something. How valuable or useful that something is is debatable, and there are probably better things to bu…
Seriously? I watch almost no television, and most of it is utter mind-rot.
But of course watching something can "accomplish something" -- it can broaden your experience of reality by showing you something that took place on the other side of the world, or ten years ago.
The best television shows you moments of life that otherwise only the people who were actually present might have had a chance to see.
Re: How to Take a Walk
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Woah, we've had some 'pack 'em in' zoning here in New Zealand but I've never seen anything where they left out footpaths entirely. Has anyone got a representative Google street view link for SW Portland or something similar? (And is this really quite common across the US?)
My mother-in-law lives in a neighborhood with no sidewalk. However, it's got very little traffic, and it's a 20mph zone. When we go for a walk, we just walk on the street. A good number of people in the neighborhood do the same. A sidewalk is not always needed to have a good walk.
Yes, good point. And some of these street views (thanks everyone - most interesting!) actually look okay for walking as long as the traffic was light and slow.
Re: How to Take a Walk
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't you? People throw off subtle cues all the time, and whether they're native born or not is something that isn't hard to pick up from that. Conversely, take a native born person of Japanese or Indian descent, and send them to Japan or India. The natives there will be able to tell he isn't native born.
You can see culture, not birthplace. Those are different things. If you see me on the street, I believe you will see my family culture (Chinese) and where I was brought up (American Midwest). You will not see where I was born (East Coast).
I bet if I saw you on the street, you would register as American to me. (East Coast and Midwest register the same to me.) I would be able to tell you apart from someone who was actually born and raised in China. Conversely, if you went to China, the people there would be able to identify you as foreign-born. Your culture is similar and related to, but very different from, the culture of people still living in China. I might be able to tell you apart from more assimilated Americans of East Asian descent, though.
Re: How to Take a Walk
#170I strongly disagree with this point: > If you pass anybody, you are not walking slowly enough for it to be “taking a walk.” There are people around who walk painfully slowly. When I go for a walk, I let my legs swing at a natural cadence, with my natural stride length. If I have to change that, to ensure I don't overtake some dawdler, it places a stupidly unnecessary restriction on the definition of "taking a walk".…
I think he was trying to say that "speed walking" is not the same as taking a walk.
I don't see where you get that idea, because it isn't what he said. What he said was "If you pass anybody, you are not walking slowly enough for it to be “taking a walk.”"
i.e. You can only be classed as "taking a walk", if you are the slowest person around, or if the only people slower than you are far enough away that you won't catch them up.
This makes it extremely difficult to take a walk, particularly if you start anywhere near an old people's home, or a primary school, or an area of town where lost tourists peer down each side street in search of a landmark. Note that this is in the paragraph that declares "taking a walk" to be "not difficult".
Taking a walk by my definition - walking at my body's natural pace, aiming for nowhere in particular - is easy. His definition makes it very difficult indeed.