Fellow Substacker
of Mr. Potato's AWESOME Fitness Tips, recently wrote a post titled “Is walking every day really enough exercise?” He affirmatively answers this question in the very first sentence with an emphatic “HELL YEAH, it is!” Then he explains why, how and when to ramp up your walking routine in order to get the best benefits that walking can offer our bodies. Here’s a quote from his post to whet your appetite, and I recommend you read not only said post, but his entire archive of fitness and health related advice:“Walking is the absolute most high-percentage play you can pull off for your overall health if you're currently sedentary, and people of any fitness level will benefit from engaging in daily walking bouts, we're designed to do that shit— our limbs are insanely efficient in covering distance without overexpending calories, our thoughts flow when we do it, conversations get better, your metabolism gets better, heart health, gut health, brain health, walking is ABSOLUTELY OVERKILL.” - Mr. Potato
Walking can also tone our creative muscles and help us become more critical and compelling communicators. I highly recommend How to Walk by the late Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hanh. How to Walk is a concise book with pragmatic and innovative meditations on how walking can be a major key to living a more fulfilling life. Nhat Hanh provides short anecdotes and prompts for walking with a purpose. In other words, he suggests how we can turn ordinary walks into profound experiences that lead to good mental, physical and creative well-being.
Nhat Hanh’s lessons on walking highlight the effect that “being in the moment” has on feeling joyful, enlightened and inspired. He tells us to concentrate on breathing (in-and-out breathes) and not being concerned with a destination. Aside from the breathing exercises, the only thing to be aware of is the process of taking each step forward. This will subsequently lead the walker to have a greater sense of spatial awareness and a realization of how the environment and body works in tandem. Nhat Hanh tells us that, “when your foot touches the Earth with awareness, you make yourself alive and the Earth real, and you forget for one minute the searching, rushing and longing that rob our daily lives of awareness and cause us to ‘sleepwalk’ through life.”
The same principles of awareness and mindful physicality are evident in a wide variety of works of art. Walking shares similar common traits with many traditional art making techniques. This is because the conscious, subconscious and physical ways that we move through a space align with the somatic, expressive and intellectual processes of drawing, painting and sculpting. Modern twentieth century artist Paul Klee famously described his explorations in drawing as, “an active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk’s sake.”
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with the artist Ellen Mueller who literally wrote the book (Walking as Artistic Practice) on walking as an art form.We spoke about the utilization of walking as an artistic process that can lead to more mindful understandings of ourselves, others and the spaces we are present in. Our conversation is available on my Artfully Learning YouTube channel (please be sure to subscribe so you get notified about future episodes!), but you can simply listen to it below: