A Philosophy of Walking (16 page)

States of Well-Being
 

E
verything is valued the same nowadays: joy, pleasure, serenity, happiness … In their day, the sages of Antiquity took care to draw distinctions between these states of well-being. Such separations had particular importance, since it was through them that the schools of philosophy distinguished themselves from one another. For while all agreed that wisdom should enable people to approach a full flowering of their being, the sects based their divergences on the definition of that plenitude – the purpose of life, and the object of immense study. Cyrenaics, Epicureans, Sceptics, Platonists, each school's sages presented an absolutely distinct state of fulfilment, based on joy, happiness or serenity.

There was nothing sectarian about the walking experience, however. In a precise manner, it was open to all these possibilities, offering the chance to experience all these states, to different degrees, on different occasions. It was a practical introduction to all the great ancient wisdoms.

Pleasure first, perhaps. Pleasure is a matter of encountering. It is a possibility of feeling that finds completion in an encounter with a body, element or substance. That is all there is to pleasure: agreeable sensations, sweet, unprecedented, deliciously unexpected, wild … It is always some sensation, and always triggered by an encounter, by something that confirms, from outside, the possibilities inscribed in our bodies. Pleasure is the encounter with the good object: the one that causes a possibility of feeling to blossom.

The accursed peculiarity of pleasure, very often discussed, is that repetition reduces its intensity. The good object that has fulfilled me can be consumed with renewed pleasure a second time, perhaps even more intensely because, being prepared, I adopt a posture of
appreciation
: I try to explore every dimension, to taste it in all its fullness. A third time, a fourth … by now the furrows, the ruts, are already traced, and it becomes something known, or recognized. It's the same thing, the same fruit, the same wine, the same touch, but it is already traced faintly in my body: it no longer runs through it leaving a glowing mark. Because that intensity is what people seek in pleasure: that moment in which the faculties of feeling are overwhelmed, awakened, shaken up and challenged. It becomes flat with repetition, warmed
over, tiresome, always the same. Hence a dual strategy: diversity or quantity. Either you change types, find other varieties, move on to different genres, or else you increase the dose. Both strategies work, a little, the first few times they are tried: some of the lost intensity is recovered. But the effects are too much anticipated, hoped for, tracked: there is an expectation of pleasure so exact that the pleasure is killed.

In walking, you find these moments of pure pleasure, around encounters. The scent of blackberries or myrtle, the gentle warmth of an early summer sun, the freshness of a stream. Something never known before. In this way walking permits, in bright bursts, that clearance of a path to feeling, in discreet quantities: a handful of encounters along the way.

Joy is another thing, less passive and more demanding, less intense and more complete, less local and richer. Joy too is experienced in walking, understood this time as the affect linked to an activity. The same fundamental idea can be found in Aristotle and Spinoza: joy is the accompaniment to an affirmation.

Sadness is passivity: when I just can't do it. I drive myself, I am constrained, everything resists. I endure, I try force. I start again and it's the same inertia: I don't get there. I dry up, staring at the blank page: too difficult. The words don't come, they drag their feet and butt each other like clumsy
and grotesque pachyderms, lining up in wheezy disorder to form rickety sentences. Failure in sporting competition: too hard, legs like gateposts, body an anvil. It won't do what it's told and runs aground, a shapeless mass. Discouragement with a musical instrument: the fingers don't respond, they are like over-heavy mallets. The voice slips and changes register. The vocal cords creak. Or lastly, lassitude at work: too repetitive, too voluminous. Push the machine to keep going against boredom and fatigue. Nothing does the trick: sadness. Sadness is a blocked affirmation, hampered, contradicted, gone bad.

When I have to perform a difficult action, I start again, I persist, and then eventually the action works. After that I accomplish it easily, with increasing agility. Everything goes well and quickly. It's the same when training has overcome initial stiffness: the body lightens up, it
responds
. Joy is not the satisfied contemplation of an accomplished result, the emotion of victory, the satisfaction of having succeeded. It is the sign of an energy that is deftly deployed, it is a free affirmation: everything comes easy. Joy is an activity: executing with ease something difficult that has taken time to master, asserting the faculties of the mind and the body. Joys of thought when it finds and discovers, joys of the body when it achieves without effort. That is why joy, unlike pleasure, increases with repetition, and is enriched.

When you are walking, joy is a basso continuo. Locally, of course, you may run into effort and difficulty. You will also find immediate moments of contentment: a proud gaze backwards to contemplate the long steep plunge of
the slope behind you. Those satisfactions, though, too often present an opportunity to reintroduce quantities, scores, figures (which track? how long? what altitude?). And walking becomes a competition. That is why expeditions in high mountain country (conquering peaks, each one a challenge) are always slightly impure: because they give rise to narcissistic gratification. What dominates in walking, away from ostentation and showing off, is the simple joy of feeling your body in the most primitively natural activity. Watch a small child taking his first steps, the radiance that comes over him in making one step after another. When you walk, the basso continuo of joy comes from feeling the extent to which the body is made for this movement, the way it finds in each pace the resource for the next.

Even apart from the action of walking, but compatible with it, there is also joy experienced as fullness, the joy of living. After a whole day's walking, the simple relaxation of taking the weight off your legs, satisfying your hunger simply, having a quiet drink and contemplating the declining daylight, the gentle fall of night.
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The body free from hunger and thirst, without aches, the body at rest, the simple feeling of being alive is enough to produce the highest sort of joy, of pure intensity and absolute modesty: the joy of living, of feeling oneself
here
, tasting one's own presence in harmony with the world's. Alas, though, too many of us, for too long, have been ensnared by bad images into believing that plenitude depends on the possession of
objects, on social prestige. We are already beyond that, we always have been. The experience of walking surely constitutes a reconquest of that state, because subjecting the body to a prolonged activity – which as we know brings joy, but also fatigue and boredom – causes the appearance, when it is at rest, of fullness or plenitude, that secondary, deeper, more fundamental joy, linked with a more secret affirmation: the body breathes gently, I am alive and I am here.

Also experienced while walking is what might be called ‘happiness', often better described by writers and poets than great thinkers, since it is a matter of encounters and depends on situations. The
pleasure
that is taken in savouring wild berries from the hedgerow or the caress of a breeze on the cheeks; the
joy
of walking and feeling the body advancing ‘like a man alone'; the
fullness
of feeling alive. And then
happiness
, before the spectacle of a violet-shadowed valley below the beams of the setting sun, that miracle of summer evenings, when for a few minutes every shade of colour, flattened all day by a steely sun, is brought out at last by the golden light, and breathes. Happiness can come later, at the guesthouse, in the company of others staying there: people met there, happy to find themselves together for a moment through chance. But all of that involves receiving.

Happiness involves finding oneself the recipient of a spectacle, a moment, an atmosphere, and taking, accepting and grasping the blessing of the moment. For that there can
be no recipe, no preparation; one has to be there when the moment comes. Otherwise, it's something else: satisfaction in having achieved something, joy in doing what you know how to do. Happiness is fragile precisely because it is not repeatable; opportunities for it are rare and random, like gold threads in the world's fabric. They ought to be seized.

Lastly, the state of
serenity
, again something different: more than detachment, less than wonder; more than resignation, less than affirmation. A steady balance in the soul. Walking leads to it, quietly, gradually, through the very alternation of rest and movement. It is linked obviously with the slowness of walking, its absolutely repetitive character; you have to
bring yourself
to it.

Serenity means no longer being trapped in the agitated oscillations of fear and hope, and even placing yourself beyond all certainty (because certainties are defended, argued, constructed). When you have set off for the day, and know that it will take so many hours to reach the next stage, there's nothing left to do but walk, and follow the road.
Nothing else to do
. At all events, it will be long, every stride stepping over the seconds without shortening the hours. At all events, evening will come and the legs will have ended by engulfing, in small bites, the impossible distance. It is an inevitability with inevitable effects. There is virtually no need to decide, consider, calculate. Nothing to do but walk. You could think ahead perhaps, but at walking pace things
go too slowly for that. Anticipation would be discouraging. So you should just keep going, at your own pace, to the end of this leg of the journey.