Wanderful

None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze. — Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

In the hushed stillness of the early morning, there’s a raw edge to the streets I know so well — something hangs in the atmosphere like an orchestrated pause before the great awakening. I snuggle further into my marshmallow coat, fully protected against the encroaching chill of winter. 

I am walking, moving at a leisurely pace despite the shadowy darkness of a day beginning its transition. The hum of urban life is momentarily subdued as I strike the ground to a silent beat, shifting between cracked paving, gritty asphalt and unyielding clay. 

As forecasted on the early morning news, the air carries a crispness almost palpable and clouds overhead begin to gather in their languorous way.

Pockets of sprouting grass, still clothed with crystals of early-morning dew, valiantly stake their claim amidst the urban sprawl.

Pathways weathered by time and marked with the imprints of countless journeys snake in all directions around me. I wonder which route beckons today, and find myself along a path before the question is answered. Every morning I am taught the same lesson — that my body is merely a vessel for what the mind wants. Each step is assured and I walk knowing the earth will forever remember the tread of my soles. 

After a while, I slip into the hypnotic quality of the movement, drawing parallels to the rhythmic sway of a pendulum. I synchronise the motions together and the imaginative swaying pendulum now merges with my own rhythm — right arm forward, left leg forward, right arm back, left leg back; an easy kind of kinetic poetry.