What we mean by ‘walking’

By Dr Rodney Reynolds

Walking need not exclude people who live with limited or restricted mobility. In this respect, Mindful Walking functions as a conceptual activity. It offers people an opportunity to establish and emphasize relationships with lived social, natural and built environments regardless of their age or physical and mental capabilities. Walking means reflecting on what walking encompasses. Doing so suggests why walking matters.

We apparently do not require language to think. Contemporary research has demonstrated that thinking occurs through our bodies, our senses and our emotions. So, thinking happens in a variety of ways and through a range of expressive modes and activities. And yet, we nevertheless rely upon linguistic descriptions to reveal to ourselves and to others the worlds in which we live and the values of those worlds. More specifically, through language we share our conceptualizations of the kinds of activities, values and ideas that comprise, invent and distinguish the worlds in which we dwell.

‘Walking’ or ‘to walk’, for instance, functions to define the worlds of English speakers in a variety of ways. We employ it to define or delimit how environments cause us to confront ourselves and the worlds we have made (often through language). By utilizing ‘walking’ in spoken, written and embodied forms, we construct conceptual and practical environments that others familiar with our language will probably recognize. At the very least, English users (or whatever shared language one wishes to employ) would expect to encounter mutual acknowledgement of the range of meanings and connotations that walking might embrace. This fact holds true even when some of those meanings might seem more poetic than quotidian and of course they need not exhaust the word’s potential. So, what senses could walking encompass?

Photo credit goes to Miriam Müller

‘Walk’, in its various grammatical forms entered the English language with Germanic origins. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘walk’ emerged as a verb with many of its contemporary connotations from colloquial usage, only at the beginning of the Middle English period. Previously, consistent with its Germanic roots, it had indicated a kneading or rolling action. In the middle period, English speakers transformed the meaning of ‘walk’, perhaps drawing on the sense of movement inherent in rolling and kneading, so that it could describe a process of movement that involved bipedal locomotion. Walking therefore suggests an activity that one does through volition. It exists as verb, noun and adjective and so describes an action, a place or a thing (activity) as well as an undertaking.

A walk might imply a shared or accompanied activity as well as something solitary. It might suggest intimacy, privacy or confidentiality. Walking communicates adoption of a pace without haste as well as change through repetition. Walking thus demonstrates the inherent variability of a thing’s state or of a mentality. We walk to occasion change. Walking encompasses practice or rehearsal – the walk through – and so the capacity and opportunity for internal and third party observation, correction and mastery. Given these characteristics, walking builds on human capacities that come along with the fact of our embodied selves that also create pathways and places and invent worlds.

In the above sense, walking does not restrict itself to bipedal locomotion. Walking does not exclude those without normative corporeal capacity. On the contrary, walking embraces those capabilities that make us human. We intend with the Mindful Walking Project to draw attention to those human capabilities and to explore them creatively with the public in Bloomsbury and Kings Cross London through curated experiences that will draw on our full human abilities.

This blog post was written by Dr Rodney Reynolds from the UCL Institute for Global Health. Rodney Reynolds conceptualized the Mindful Walking Project along with UCL and Coventry University colleagues to both explore and demonstrate the value and validity of combining walking and mindfulness as a wellbeing strategy for members of the UCL academic community, residents of the Bloomsbury, Kings Cross areas and for the general public.