As a teenager, me and my friends would spend hours walking around our hometown, a medium-size city off the northern coast of Spain. While updating each other on the weekly events, gossip and love interests, we would walk the whole city back and forth several times non-stop, barely paying attention to where we were going. In these dynamics, mind, body and space were all one, and the city was as much a part of ourselves, an extension of our bodies, as we were a part of the city, one of its many buzzing elements.

Many years have gone by since, and I have never stopped walking. And until I read Rebecca Solnit’s book, I had never stopped to consider why I walked at all. I simply walked. I walk to the supermarket, to work or to my friends’ place. I walk for 10 minutes or 3 hours. Up to the mountain or down to the beach, across fields and sometimes highways and past towns. For necessity, exercise or leisure. In short, if I can reach a place on foot, I will not use any other means, and anyone who knows me also knows that I trust nothing but my own two feet to flow around.

This book (which, by the way, was recommended to me by a friend after a day we had enjoyed a long walk) conceptualises the action of walking in its entirety: from how the idea of “going for a walk” and mountaineering started, to the architecture revolving around it, up to the political sphere of walking. To summarise it within a few lines would be a titanic work, plus it will do the book no justice. Suffice it to say that, as the great thinker, historian and writer that she is, Solnit invites us to reflect on how we occupy the outer spaces, as well as the inner ones, through the practice of advancing one foot after the other. She proclaims walking a collective activity, and not merely an individual one, that may produce social transformations, and dares to suggest that this once common mode of transport, nowadays almost forgotten in the big cities taken by speed and anxiety, may experience a comeback.

Indeed, it may be time to slow down and go back to feeling the soil underneath as we move along, to remember what it was like to be connected to the natural world we belong to. I have already mentioned in a previous post how during the pandemics our corporeality regained a self-conscious dimension, and many people could be seen basking in their walking, their one daily moment of freedom. Yet, the effect seems to be waning as the lockdown measures do. But if there is a common element across the history of walking that this book reveals is how it’s ultimately a small group of people —generally considered outcasts, misfits, or coming from lower classes— the ones who start the movement: from Wordsworth and other nature Romantics, to John Muir and his Sierra Club, to the French women who marched to Versailles; it takes one to create the inertia of a movement for others to follow.

Contrary to popular belief, Solnit makes it clear that walking is not about exercising (at least this is not its primary function, although it does have a positive impact on health, she stresses), rather, it is a way of connecting to our surroundings and to each other, much like my teenage self and friends used to do. Of course, one of the reasons we walked was because we had no money for other activities. Be it as it may, walking became an integral part of our friendship, so much so that even nowadays, the one time a year we happen to meet, we often find ourselves wandering around the city in the same fashion we used to, unaware of where we are going, not trying to reach anyplace, simply moving one alongside the other, walking and talking, thinking and walking, our paces creating a harmonic rhythm, our feet rediscovering the old pavement and roads and grassy and sandy paths, our bodies, the city and its landscape forming one close-knit reality. Connecting.