I started walking around my neighborhood more. Compared with those wild places, this was unremarkable: pacing down a sidewalk of 10-year-old maples, across cracked squares of pavement, alongside a ditch bursting with spring runoff. But I turned it into a practice of sensation. I listened. I felt. And in a remarkable way, the neighborhood came alive — alive in a way that those mountaintops or the wildflower-strewn rivulet in the valley below never had. My senses, once atrophied, came to life, and with them, so did the world around me.
My experience, which took me from the rugged wild to a tamer, humbler landscape outside my front door, went against the grain of a few hundred years of traditional nature writing, but so be it.
My strolls taught me that walking truly is a discipline and an art. The discipline of removing assumption — thinking that something is going to be beautiful does as much damage to a place as thinking it will be ugly. It is an art of attention. There was no satori, or breakthrough moment. I had the kind of experience young lovers do when, after hanging out every day for two months, it finally occurs to them they’re in love. They smile, but they can’t remember the precise moment their love began.
I realized the main thing preventing a more intimate connection to the natural world was concept — the mysterious filters our mind lodges between us and the world, at every turn, at every second, in just about every interaction. Concepts can be good: We get the concept of “mortal danger” when a car is hurtling toward us. But concepts, also a form of assumption, can neuter experience because pure sensations become impure when we judge them. Concepts are what we deploy when we ask what we can get out of a walk, rather than the opposite.
Researchers who study our brain activity while we walk use the term “automaticity” to describe how our body behaves on a stroll. Automaticity is defined as “the ability of the nervous system to successfully coordinate movement with minimal use of attention-demanding executive control resources.”
We should leverage the gift of walking to stop thinking and start doing, apparently, what walking is asking us to do — pay attention to the stuff of place, the place itself. To arrive at that point takes time, and discipline, but when it does, delight bubbles up, a “praising of the mysterious and tender touching we are so often in the midst of,” according to Ross Gay, poet and author of “The Book of Delights.” Place comes to life, any place, from the life we gave it, from attentiveness.