WALK THIS WAY: A neglected way of making time By RAY WADDLE Twice in recent times I wanted to walk somewhere, but people around me objected. During a visit to relatives, I proposed walking to church – three blocks away. “Dont walk. We will drop you off,” they said Sunday morning. “No, really, I want to walk.” “What if it rains?” they pleaded. It was a crisp, fall sunny morning. “I will be leaving in 10 minutes.” The other was last month in Washington, D.C. I decided to walk from the hotel to Union Station – nearly two miles – a nice break from sitting, writing, conferring, networking. “Nobody walks,” the concierge said. “Take the Metro. Its right there. You dont want to walk.” I thanked him, looked obligingly at the subway station, and walked, without looking back. Is there a prejudice these days against walking? The times seem offended by the very idea of a stroll. Walking plays no role in globalization, except in the world of the border refugee. It is hard to spend money when you are walking. From the heights of the economic fast track, walking looks tainted, implying you cannot afford a car (true, many people cannot), or, worse, you are in no hurry. All this makes walking a small act of rebellion. The more idle the amble, the better. But walking is no stunt. It can save your sanity and remind you you are alive. The 21st century trump-card argument for a daily walk, of course, is it cuts down on pollution and promotes good health. No need even to bring them up. Walking is more practical and urgent even than that. Walking is the transportation industry equivalent of writing longhand -- a way to slow down your thoughts. It expands that underachieving modern muscle, the attention span. Unplugged, off the grid (and without cell phone or iPod), a walk fixes attention on the forgotten but enduring details – the surface of the earth, the neighborhood, ones own clumsy thoughts. Walking sharpens the senses. It delivers the present moment. Walking, even on a bad day, sends me in the direction of serenity, just around the corner. We could name various laudable sects of walking. There is the drive-over-to-Radnor-Lake-for-a-quicky-immersion-in-nature strategy. Or the I-will-walk-the-entire-Appalachian-Trail option (2,175 miles, Georgia to Maine). I know a fearless Nashville soul whose idea of a promenade is to cover five zip codes in a day -- an eight-hour odyssey, with purposeful hydration stops at pubs and taverns along his flexible route. (He has a following.) But it is possible to traffic in smaller denominations. Just go around the block or two -- 20 minutes. A short stretch is enough to recover from e-mail, reclaim memory of the body, recount a dream, take a reading of the days emotional temperature. A simple constitutional (interesting word) invites me to discover the next story idea, the next solution, which shoots upward from an unspoken artesian mental well, unleashed by sheer motion, rhythm and oxygen production. Some such stirring happens virtually every time. (As a daily task I walk our demanding, prancing corgi, who expects to take regular inventory of her street and area code. Walking the dog, not walking the human, does not really qualify as a walk.) Walking has its sacred texts and literary touchstones. In the Bible, they walked everywhere, starting early in Genesis when anxious Adam and Eve heard God walking fatefully toward them “in the cool of the day.” The believer’s “walk with Jesus” is a gentle, persistent metaphor. (Nobody carpools with Christ or telecommutes with Messiah -- not yet). Poet Wallace Stevens, an insurance lawyer, walked two miles to work every day, scrawling poems on some interior notepad as he hoofed into downtown Hartford, CT, in his suit and tie. The tune Walk This Way saved Aerosmith’s career. I Walk the Line did not hurt Johnny Cash either. But the great romancer of the walk is surely Henry David Thoreau, whose 1851 essay “Walking” runs to 30 high-spirited pages. He was a fearsome walker (four hours a day) who preferred to saunter, a word that possibly stems from “sainte terre,” or holy land. So a saunterer is a holy-lander, he says, because every walk is a kind of pilgrimage, a free-wheeling adventure. (He also likes to think saunter comes from “sans terre,” without land or home.) “We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return – prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms,” Thoreau wrote in a fit of understatement. “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again – if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.” A person who steps out for a walk suddenly rejoins Thoreau’s century and every other eon before computers and motor oil, when the human connection to earth was harsher but more vivid. You get better data at walk-speed than at mach-speed. Details release and shimmer. Neighbors come into focus. Two doors down, a senior lady lives with four cats who always poke out the window. But the place looks empty this week. Is she OK? Should I check? Front yards are spice routes of the dog world, where canines sniff the latest news and hear things from two miles away. You notice trash tumbling in the breeze, and wonder why people still litter. You notice how teenagers whoosh by in cars they pretend to control, and it triggers memories of ones own adolescent days of velocity and immortality on the vanishing horizon. Then the street traffic disappears briefly, and it is strangely silent again -- no kids outside playing pick-up football in this indoor era of video games. It could be said that walking is a kind of eyes-wide-open prayer, a meditation in motion. On my latest walk, a quotation dislodged from years ago: “We must resolve to treat each hour as the rarest of gifts, and be grateful for the consciousness that allows us to experience it …,” Memphis lawyer John McQuiston II wrote in Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living. He also said: “Every day carries the potential to bring the experience of heaven; have the courage to expect good from it.” It took a walk to remember those lines, an altered state where the abstract technologies of modern routine momentarily fall away, and old-fashioned alertness to earthy detail and memory rise to the light. The alertness will save you. Take care out there. Avoid the dangerous stretches of road. Wave to the postal workers and census takers, those last professional walkers. And watch out for the drivers, who are moving faster than they realize, and not paying enough attention, and are probably annoyed (or envious) of the sudden walker on their periphery. You’re the sane one. Stay alive to the next unfolding moment, which has somehow survived and contains everything that has happened up to now.