Learning To Walk The Walk
Walk the walk has become a popular trope, meaning practise what you preach. But walking the walk has other, more consequential meanings.
In the Australian Aboriginal community the 'walkabout' is a traditional rite of passage, a coming of age from youth to adulthood, which requires the adolescent male to go alone into the bleak desolation of the Outback following the 'Songlines', the trails in the bush left by generations of his forebears.
More than a trial of physical and mental endurance, the walkabout is the initiation of an individual seeking a sense of oneness with the land of his ancestral legacy, a holy communion linking a single consciousness with the universal.
In contemporary investment idiom Random Walk Theory refers to the principle of unpredictability that underlies the rise and fall of stock markets. An often used analogy for this is that of an inebriate who wanders aimlessly about and ends up not knowing where he is.
Stock market analysis apart, Random Walk Theory is used in a number of disciplines, from the sociology of group behaviour to devising military strategy.
However, as cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz shows us in her delightful book, On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes , we don't have to venture into the Australian wilderness, or be a market analyst, or military strategist, to learn new ways to walk the walk.
Horowitz begins her walkabout of discovery by noting how our ability of mental concentration, of focusing and harnessing our minds to immediate tasks, enables us to get on in the practical, workaday world. But this laser-like concentration also blinkers us and narrows our field of outer and inner vision.
By the act of reading, you are 'marshalling your attention to these words…You are ignoring the vast majority of what is happening around you…The events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you'.
So, while concentrating on reading, or anything else, is essential for us to get on with everyday living, it also makes us literally lose sight of a world unseen and unlived.
Horowitz explores this unlived world by taking eleven walks of the same block of her native New York City with eleven different companions, ranging from Pumpernickel, her 'curly-haired, sage, mixed breed' canine buddy, to an artist, a geologist, and other 'Experts', each with a different way of seeing the same things.
'Minor clashes between my dog's preferences as to where and how a walk should proceed and my own indicated that I was experiencing…an entirely different block than my dog…I had become a sleeper on the sidewalk…what my dog showed me was that my attention invited…inattention to everything else'.
Horowitz's walks became excursions into the art of observation, of seeing with a fresh set of eyes. 'Together, we became investigators of the ordinary…in this way, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the old the new.'
The next time you go for a customary stroll, make it uncustomary by taking along a walking companion, with two legs or four. Who knows what new world, or worlds, you might find yourself in.
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