Moving Bodies; an essay on walking

This essay is a short description of walking as a bodily movement to comprehend motion and response to our surroundings. As a daily activity for everyone, we walk through environments, but hardly contemplate how our bodies move. This text looks into movement, the advantages of the bipedal mode of walking, and its haptic involvement with the environment empowering humans to function as social beings.

In her book Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit (2001, p. 13) gives a poetic description of walking;

“Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking.”

However, poetic it sounds, it’s an essentiality of daily life. Indeed, during a walk, the body is in motion, not through being seated in a vehicle but physically moving the body and its parts to commit it as an activity. Some may refer to it as travel yet travelling could be also achieved by being immobilised on a seat. Although both involve passage through the environment, in walking mobility is attained by the motion of feet, legs, arms and entire body in environments. It is a bodily movement (Thoreau, 1993), and a balance between idling, doing and being (Solnit, 2001). It is an intentional process near to involuntary rhythms of the body like the beating of the heart and breathing of the lungs.

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Looking at a non-poetic approach; human evolution, the anatomical transformation like balancing of the head above the shoulder and neck, the curvature of vertebrae, straightening of legs as well as broadening of the pelvis gave humans their upright position (Huxley, 1894). The enlargement of the brain and remodelling of the hand with bipedal movement of two legs and feet ultimately provided advantages to humans over other animals like apes. Charles Darwin (1888) in ‘The Descent of Man’ discussed the physiological division of labour, by which hands and feet were perfected for different and complementary functions for support, locomotion, grasping and manipulation. We embarked upon the route to civilisation by standing up straight and walking on our feet.

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For any person, it is a universal act of movement, that helps to develop a dialogue with our environment and situate ourselves in space (Schine, 2010) and contributes to our daily narratives of life. During a walk through the connection of our feet to the ground and people make sense of the surroundings (Ingold, 2021), being barefoot or with shoes, we touch the tactical surfaces and develop haptic experiences. Here, a forward movement becomes central to the embodied experience of space (Steadman et al., 2021), the environment passes through us or we make it move through our movements. As one moves, the background becomes the past, the foreground becomes the future and the motion on the ground works as the present. It is ideally a state in which body, mind and the world become aligned to give meaning to ourselves and our environment.

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It is an activity to explore the surrounding and empower humans to meet their basic needs. It is movement and exploration that establish the foundation for the lives of animals as well as humans (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011). This can be clearly observed in children during their initial walks, the bipedal mode of walking may seem catastrophic (Napier, 1967) but there is a great zeal to walk and explore. They lean forward with their tiny bodies and rush to balance their legs under the weight of the body, their plump legs always lag behind or move ahead. Children begin to walk not only due to the encouragement of caregivers but to chase desires which are not fulfilled by others like moving fast, being independent and free from the eyes of elders. In the process, they are able to understand their surroundings.

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In many ways, walking down a street is a fundamentally social activity. A person walking on the street scans the settings, people, the ground surface and the built environment. Then, she is responsive to the environment: built or natural, both; further, her steps, direction, and pace depend on the movements of others in her immediate surroundings (Goffman, 2009). In most cases voluntarily or involuntarily people are involved in collective experience and interaction when walking on the street. They share the same space, interact, and react to one another. It doesn’t have to be an organised event like a parade, procession or march but day-to-day life also provides opportunities to have communal involvement.

Walking is a rhythmic motion that resonates with the movement of others, whose paths and journeys we cross while navigating our own routes. As Ingold and Vergunst (pg 2, 2008) write “we walk because we are social beings, we are also social beings because we walk”.?Walking is a social act, but we mostly treat it as a destination-achieving act in the production-oriented culture of the 21st century. Perhaps by relooking at the lived experience of walking we can rethink what ‘social’ and ‘collective’ means and contribute to our cities not only to be beautiful but more liveable.

References

Darwin, C. (1888). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (Vol. 1). Murray.

Goffman, E. (2009). Relations in public. Transaction Publishers.

Huxley, T. H. (1894). Collected Essays: Man’s place in nature, and other anthropological essays (Vol. 7). Macmillan.

Ingold, T. (2021). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. Routledge.

Ingold, T., & Vergunst, J. L. (2008). Ways of walking: Ethnography and practice on foot. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Napier, J. (1967). The antiquity of human walking. Scientific American, 216(4), 56–67.

Schine, J. (2010). Movement, memory & the senses in soundscape studies. Canadian Acoustics, 38(3), 100–101.

Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2011). The primacy of movement (Vol. 82). John Benjamins Publishing.

Solnit, R. (2001). Wanderlust: A history of walking. Penguin.

Steadman, C., Roberts, G., Medway, D., Millington, S., & Platt, L. (2021). (Re) thinking place atmospheres in marketing theory. Marketing Theory, 21(1), 135–154.

Thoreau, H. D. (1993). Walking. na.