Don’t Think About It
We’re hostages of gravity. We’re the ball in the pinball machine, forever falling, spending our turn bouncing off the bumpers of life. There’s no harm in pretending you have control of your bounces.
But it’s best not to overthink it.
There’s this recognized psychological effect called Humphrey’s Law. It’s most vividly described in a poem by Katherine Craster. A version of the poem appears in The Way of Zen by Alan Watts, but I think this is the original:
A centipede was happy — quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, “Pray, which leg moves after which?”
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.
This is a post in praise of walking. And I begin by talking about falling because walking is falling.
Here’s how you walk: you lean forward, which puts you off-balance, so you start to fall. So you stick one foot out to catch yourself. That stops your fall and reverses your tilt, but not your forward momentum. So you lean forward again, past your new center of gravity, and you have to put your other foot out to catch yourself. And you keep falling off one foot onto the other. And magically, this insane process moves you forward without planting you on your face on the floor.
Of course, if you tried to walk following the directions I just gave you, you’d be in the ditch with the centipede. It’s an accurate description of what you do when you walk. You really do those things.
But it only works if you don’t think about it.
And there’s a lot to not think about. My iPhone tells me that my step length this week averaged from 21.3 to 24.4 inches, my double support time was 30.4%, my walking asymmetry was 1.3%, and that I walked at an average speed of 3.6 mph for 1.9 miles a day, climbing the equivalent of 1–2 floors. Double support time is the percentage of time during a walk that both your feet are on the ground. You want to be in the 20–40% range. But thinking about your double support time while you are walking will cause you to walk like you’re in a Monty Python sketch.
Don’t think about it.
Not having to think about walking frees your mind for other things. Like enjoying the sights and sounds of nature or talking (at a safe social distance) with your neighbor. Studies show that walking can improve your mood, your decision-making, your heart health, and your sleep patterns.
Running is fine, but it’s not the same thing. You have to pay more attention when you run. You have to avoid distractions. But the unconscious nature of walking means that you can go ahead and be distracted. And the distractions are a big part of why you want to go for a walk in the first place.
Life, John Lennon sang, is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. Life is found in the distractions.
Here’s a poem I wrote about our daily walks:
The stillness of this morning is complete
Till it is shattered by a raven’s croak.
Its echoes die. We walk along and meet
Our neighbor, chat beside the ancient oak,
Continue to the river where we count
The turtles on the rocks, now three, now four.
Back at the porch the same three steps we mount,
And shed four shoes, and step inside our door.
Four times a day we tread the self-same trail
While all the time the river rushes on,
The raven cedes domain to hawk or quail,
And even the rock-like turtles now are gone.
What we can catch in cycles, that we own.
The cycles of the world remain unknown.