As someone who has enjoyed a daily walk for most of the past 30 years, I deeply enjoyed this.
We are asking what we can get out of a walk, rather than what a walk can get out of us. This might seem like a small distinction, a matter of semantics. But when we begin to think of walking in terms of the latter, we change the way we navigate and experience — literally and figuratively — the world around us.
To understand the difference, we need to ask more about what Mr. Lopez explained is the purpose of all this sensory input. “The purpose of such attentiveness is to gain intimacy, to rid yourself of assumption,” he wrote in his essay “A Literature of Place.”
When I first read that line, I’ll be honest, I didn’t get it. What does intimacy have to do with assumption? And what does walking have to do with intimacy? And what does “assumption” mean?
Opinion | The Transcendent Power of Walking - The New York Times