The Ambling Mind

Welcome to the Convivial Society. This is a newsletter about technology and culture, or, to borrow the title of my friend Lee Vinsel’s excellent podcast, peoples and things. The general idea is to think well about the meaning of technology and how it structures our experience while also conveying some sense of how we might better order our relationship to technology. In this installment, I offer some thoughts about walking, a core human activity, which has been increasingly neglected or marginalized in the modern world. What we stand to gain by walking reminds us of one of the key principles of a convivial society: there is a scale appropriate to the human experience, and we do well to operate within it.

I also happen to be celebrating a birthday as I write this installment. And what better gift than supporting the work with a paid subscription at a discounted rate of roughly $34/year or $3.75/month? Cheers!

A few weeks back I shared a few lines from Kierkegaard about the virtues of walking. “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk,” Kierkegaard advised a friend in despair. “Every day,” he went on to say, “I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” This struck me as good counsel.

Since then, I’ve serendipitously encountered a handful of similar meditations on the value of walking, so I’ve taken that as sign to briefly gather some of these together and offer them to you, chiefly because they collectively remind us that there is a scale of activity and experience appropriate to the human animal and things tend to go well for us when we mind it.

I should acknowledge at the outset that I am not a highly accomplished walker, by which I mean someone who has walked extensively, in varied terrains, and has perhaps also reflected at some length on the practice.1 I’m sure, though, that most people who I might think of as highly accomplished walkers would resist my characterization, and, I should add, I certainly don’t mean to encourage a hierarchical framing of what is a thoroughly egalitarian activity. Nonetheless, you get my point. I try to get out and walk a fair amount, but these are always ...