If walking changes the direction of travel
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In Chinese the word “tao” means path and is made up of two radicals, one representing “two feet”, the other “a head”. Because we do not walk only with the strength of the legs and the heart pumping blood but with the desire to purify the gaze, wash clichés, checkmate fears, sweep away urbanization. Walking is nothing more than knowing how to stop, it is an initiatory rite within oneself to find other voices, other rooms. To discover life ahead of him. David Le Breton, French sociologist and anthropologist who in the past had already dedicated profound texts to the meaning of going (The world on foot. In praise of the march 2000, Walk. In praise of paths and slowness 2012), back on his trail with Life on foot. A practice of happiness to convince us – and he succeeds, page after page – that walking is a metronome of humor and joy.
The fatigue of the first step
It is important to get on the road. Of course, it is tiring to get up from the sofa and abandon the security, even though gloomy and narrow, of everyday life. But there are places that almost await us, horizons where recognition and rapture emerge simultaneously because, as the great ecologist Henry David Thoreau wrote, “they tell me that right there my life will meet me and, like a hunter, I walk to find it ». The silence around, the senses that are refined: «walking restores the depth of presence, it is a powerful tool for finding oneself». In a word to exist that, as per etymology (ex-sistere), is nothing more than running away from oneself, moving away from a fixed place.
Of course, in the past, and still today, for many populations, walking is a matter that concerns the poor, migrants, a vital need. It is also for us, we appeal to the useless to find the essence and a very long life. If we think that a day of walking corresponds to half an hour by car, after all, perhaps we walk to live longer and go very far. Le Breton says he was seized by the desire for the Amazon at a certain point in his life, that is, “a place in which to eventually disappear or start over”. Appreciating the slowness that expands everything and a personal pace of march that makes a “good effort” grow inside: “the real man breathes with his heels”, wrote the Chinese mystic Chuang Tzu in the fourth century BC. But how timely is his reflection. As well as the memorable pages of Matsuo Bashō: “incompleteness is the condition of humanity, and grasping what happens is a way to merge in time, not to stop it but to feed on it”.
Not just Santiago
Perhaps the paths, especially the one that leads to the tomb of St. James, in Spain, have become a fashion: Protestantism had banned them as a form of superstition, the modernization of the twentieth century had left little space, then they were reborn, little by little by the 1970s. In 1982 there were 182 pilgrims in Santiago, 4,500 in 1990, 25,200 in 1997 and today it is almost half a million. Only fashion? “The goal is accessory, it is a pretext to set out on the road”, to measure oneself, measure one’s strength, find one’s body, space, silence and others and suck the marrow of life to the bottom.
Around the landscape, the plants, the places palpitate: for the Indians the earth is a soul, in Japan the kami are powers contained in a rock, in a waterfall, in a tree, for the Andean peoples the earth is a living body whose veins are the rivers and the hair the plants. They have always been there and walking in their midst gives moments of grace and breath of infinity because man, wrote John Muir, “is part of the whole of nature, neither old nor young, neither sick nor healthy, but immortal”.
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