#alifeonfoot

[iamjim]

Learning to walk.

‘Know how to walk and you know how to live', suggests the author Stephen Graham in The Gentle Art of tramping. I have tramped, traipsed, bimbled, strolled, hiked, sauntered and wandered for over fourty years.  But with all these years of footing it, do I really know how to walk beyond the simple mechanics of it? Can I learn how to walk better and in turn learn better how to live?

If Forest Gump was going somewhere, he was running. Throughout my early childhood in a car-less family of six, if I was going somewhere, I was walking. From school and back everyday, a 5 mile round trip in every kind of weather, to traipsing into town on a Saturday to help mum with the shopping, bulging Kwik Save bags cutting the circulation in my finger-ends on the trudge home, then Sunday morning was a stroll to Church for early mass with a quick-walk back to catch the last of the morning cartoons, walking was at the centre of family life. I never considered walking as anything other than simply how I traveled anywhere. Some years later the opportunity for my walking, and my relationship with walking, was changed when the family car finally arrived.

I was ten years old when a beige Ford Cortina with faux tiger skin seat covers pulled up outside our house, my grinning mum at the wheel. If a Rolls Royce had turned up instead, I don't think I'd have been any more impressed. During the school holidays that summer, mum and dad filled the car with my sisters and me, a flask and sandwiches for the way and headed North. Two hours later and we arrived at what I now hold as my heaven on earth, my place of retreat, my Shangri-la; the English Lake District. I found there a playground for the wanderer, a place to walk just for the pleasure of it, a place I now appreciate for the space both physically and mentally that being there gives me. I have walked countless memories into the mud, fells and paths that I struggle to stay in the present when wandering ways I have walked for years, the memories return unbidden and thick.

I am still learning how to walk. I am more Tortoise than Hare, a Camel rather than a Horse; in it for the distance, not the dash. I want to take joy in the way itself rather than delay gratification for some peak or place down the path. Henri Cartier Bresson, one of the most important photographers of the 20th century said “To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye, and the heart. It’s a way of life.” I think walking may be the same. Know how to walk, and you know how to live: with your head, your eye and your heart.