What a walk can't cure

Walking composition

"But to me the exile's always wretched,
Like a convict, or a patient.
Wanderer your road is dark,
And the bread of strangers tastes bitter."
—from "I'm not one of those who left their land," Anna Akhmatova*

Last weekend I had to force myself go for a walk. After several years of writing and researching about walking, I still have to do this sometimes: make myself walk when I know I need it.

I was in a glum mood, sad and bordering on grumpy, and it was a beautiful day with no commitments. My brother-in-law had sent me an album with a melancholy but light tone appropriate to my mood and the sun-dappled day. I’ve mostly weaned myself off of listening to something while walking but felt like it that day. Sometimes the right music can short-circuit the ruminations.

And so I walked for two hours, a lot of it through parts of town I rarely visit—where there are new bike and pedestrian paths!—and along the river, where I looked for and did not see any muskrats.

Toward the end of that time, when I emerged to visit the grocery store and walk home along the highway, I felt better.

I spent years researching walking. I wrote a book about it. I walked thousands of miles. I believe in what walking can do for each of us and our communities. And somehow I still have to drag myself out on a regular basis, prove to myself once again its potential for knitting good back into our lives.

When I went away to a forest service cabin again for a couple of days this week, I found myself reading through four books on walking and movement. The themes are ones I’ve explored countless times: grounding, community, physical and mental health, and what it means to reconnect with ourselves and the world around us. It amazes me how something you’ve encountered a hundred times can still feel new.

Ways of Walking, essay collection edited by Ann de Forest; 52 Ways to Walk, by Annabel Streets; Walk, by Jonathon Stalls; and Movement Matters, by Katy Bowman—thanks to Chris La Tray for recommending that last one on his newsletter.

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One of the other books I finished was Orlando Figes’s new book The Story of Russia. It read as a little hurried, as if the writing and publication were rushed, and certainly not as in-depth as his cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance, but as an overview of the mythologies that have shaped Russia’s self-perceptions, it’s pretty good.

“History and myth—and the Putin regime’s use of both,” wrote Figes, “should be reconsidered if we want to understand where Russia’s story is heading.”

“People were confused by the loss of Communism as a system of beliefs and practices. They fell into a moral vacuum. . . . The need to believe in something, anything, that offers hope, is a constant thread of Russian social history, as we have seen. The harder life in Russia is, the more its people hold on to beliefs that give them faith in salvation.”

Is this, though, that different from any other culture? I’ve seen firsthand how powerful these myths are in Russia, how the penchant for fatalism (which I’m also often guilty of) combines with a belief in their own superiority to toxic effects. But I only have to look around my own surrounding communities to feel that this is a matter of degree rather than of kind.

Konstantin Kustanovich likewise focused on the mythologies Russia tells itself (and I think better) in his book Russian and American Cultures, examining the abiding power of ancient Kievan Rus along with the idea that it is up to Russians, especially the devout, to ensure the salvation of humanity. Both books make extensive reference to the elusive and ever-romanticized mythology of a pure Russian soul, and the extent to which the Russian Orthodox Church has determined the country’s self-image and social structures:

“The tsar’s authority was founded on the myth of his divine status as an agent of God’s rule in Holy Russia, the last surviving seat of the true Orthodox faith in the Third Rome anthology. In the popular religious consciousness, always a medium for political ideas, Russia was the land of salvation, a new Israel where freedom, truth and justice would be given to people by their holy tsar.”

Figes does a good job linking the ancient near-worship of tsars, the “little-father tsar” or tsar-batiushka, to Russians’ seemingly endless appetite for strongman leaders like Putin; and tracing the entanglement of Ukraine not just in Russia’s self-mythologies about the soul of Russia and the destiny of a Russian empire, but through centuries of battle with invaders and rulers from Mongolia and Europe. The Golden Horde’s 14th-century rule over Russia, I read years ago, had left a dent in the country’s psychology, and a “fear of encirclement,” that abides to this day. The theft of Crimea in 2014 wasn’t the first battle over that territory Russia has had, and the country’s view of itself as a Euro-Asian empire is something that few even in the intelligentsia understand.

It’s a complicated history, but whose nation’s isn’t?

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The first city I ever spent time walking in was Moscow. I was 14 when we moved there, and my sister was 10, and we would spend hours walking the city together after our intensive morning Russian lessons.

I fell in love with the country then, with its literature and art, its music and the little notes of tradition that make up a culture—the complete lack of privacy in people’s tiny communal apartments, and their endless capacity to feed us chai and varenye—strong black tea and over-sweet jam; the way my grandmother’s apartment building in Leningrad smelled strongly of cucumber, and how everyone knew the same folk songs and poetry.

The cities of Russia are full of walkers, as is the countryside. My aunts and uncle and cousins think nothing of walking an entire long August day in search of mushrooms and berries. Sometimes I wonder: if walking is so powerful, as I believe it is, how can a nation full of wanderers be so ready to support acts of anger, hate, and violence?

But as with complicated histories, that question could be asked of any of us. What is that extra effort we could make, that extra step we could take, that could erode the ease with which we dismiss and dehumanize others and justify the worst of ourselves?

*This was the best online translation I could find of this Anna Akhmatova poem, but there are variations, and I think better translations, out there in print form.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• An interview I did in June with Wellevate Life just came out—talking about walking, of course: going barefoot a lot as a kid and the full-body joy of cracking ice underfoot, as well as some of the science of bipedalism. The host Irina Sharma reads a letter at the beginning, one she sent me about a year ago. I will never get tired of people’s stories about their deep relationship with walking.

• Your Undivided Attention podcast had Dr. Courtney Cogburn and Professor Jeremy Bailenson talking about how a humane and ethical metaverse could, and should, be built.

• Archaeologist Chris Fisher in Sapiens on the potential of high-resolution lidar and the urgent need for a full mapping of Earth with the Earth Archive Project before more is lost: “Such a project will serve both as a record of the state of the planet as it exists now, to help scientists better understand how it is changing, and as a ‘virtual planet’ that can serve as a precious gift for future generations.” (I’m not totally convinced; on the other hand, it is always cool to see some of the under-surface realities that lidar reveals.)

• Grant Piper on Medium with a short overview of Americans’ obsession with having ice in our drinks and how it all started in the 19th century with the Ice King of Boston: “In places like Havannah, Savannah, and Calcutta, an ice-cold drink in the dead of summer was a godsend. He started giving away ice for free for drinks hoping to get people hooked.” (Would be nice to see the commodity aspect, only touched on here, expanded, and a lot more about the energy demands of this luxury.)

• An overview on Motherboard of a collaborative effort to grant oceans legal Rights of Nature: “This abandonment of our human responsibility to the ocean, along with a denial that humans are completely interconnected with these systems, is also at the heart of the climate and marine pollution crises.”

• Charlotte Jee in MIT Technology Review on digital technology that allows us to speak to deceased relatives. “Are we ready?” she asks. (NO.) “Any service that allows you to create a digital replica of someone without their participation raises some complex ethical issues regarding consent and privacy. While some might argue that permission is less important with someone no longer alive, can’t you also argue that the person who generated the other side of the conversation should have a say too? And what if that person is not, in fact, dead?” (I’ve been trying to maintain some sympathy for this desire for after-life interaction. After all, my older sister is not the only person horrified that I burn all of my personal journals in the hottest fires I can build.)

• I loved listening to this interview with Lee Mills, a conductor with the Seattle Symphony, which his mother sent to me. Lee and I come from the same small Montana town—Belgrade—and our parents were good friends throughout my childhood. (His father’s auto body shop sponsored my T-ball team, and his mother sent the interview to me because the family he mentions at the beginning, who gave them a small piano, was mine.) It’s always a delight when a good person becomes successful at something they love, and Mills’s ability to talk about music’s relationship with physics was just beautiful.

• I keep rereading Chris La Tray’s poem “Radical Hospitality” on Grotto:

  "Given all of our
  wreaked havoc on the world,
  whose hospitality
  is most radical?"