Why Is a Picture Walk Helpful When Reading
When you read while yous wander, your destination may be a surprise.
In the desert Westward, behavior that might elsewhere be considered inexplicable, idiosyncratic, and even indefensible is tolerated—sometimes fifty-fifty encouraged. But as my x-year-former daughter, Hannah, becomes more concerned near what is normal and more worried nearly whether our family unit qualifies for that distinction, she barrages me with unanswerable questions.
Why practise I right baseball radio announcers who can't hear me and tell chicken-crossing-the-road jokes to our hens? Why practice I use fishing poles to fly kites? Why have I nicknamed my chain saw (Landshark) and my Weedwacker (Cujo)? And why, of course, practise I so often wear no pants? Sometimes I wish my kid would ask nigh something simple, similar mortality, God, or where babies come from.
Recently, Hannah asked, "Dad, why do you lot read while you walk?"
Every twelvemonth, I hike near 1,300 miles around these desert wilds exterior Reno, and I probably read my mode through 800 of them. I became a bibliopedestrian and so long ago that I've forgotten why I exercise it. But in search of an honest answer for Hannah, I've been excavating those reasons.
For starters, walking and reading are similar in many ways. Both are forms of exercise, one working out the body; the other, the mind. Both are first-class when pursued in solitude. Each gets us from ane place to another, and notwithstanding the principal purpose is always the journeying rather than the destination. They overstate our sense of the world, expanding the territory and helping us to place ourselves within it. A skilful book, like a good hike, takes u.s.a. abroad from habitation and into a series of surprises that ultimately gives the concept of home its pregnant.
Reading and walking have some other thing in mutual: Although most of united states of america know how to do both of them, we seldom seem to do either. Every bit Mark Twain put information technology, "The human who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read." Might we say the aforementioned about a person who has healthy legs merely refuses to walk?
While Karl Marx made some perceptive pronouncements about the value of books, it was the wiser Marx, Groucho, who observed that "exterior of a dog, a volume is a human being's all-time friend. Inside of a canis familiaris, information technology'south too dark to read." A volume, like a dog, is good company, and I merely don't cotton to heading out on a hike without taking both forth with me. I also like the contrasts a carefully chosen book can create with the mural through which I move. There's nothing like being on the river with Twain or at bounding main with Melville or past the pond with Thoreau while I'one thousand shuffling through the sagebrush and alkali dust. When it gets hot, I dear Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams or Rick Bass'south Winter. When it gets cold and windy, I go to the Hawaiian Islands in the poetry of Westward. S. Merwin.
Even John Muir, who is surely among the most celebrated of walkers, packed books on the trail. Muir was also familiar with the "book of nature," a trope known to many cultures, both ancient and modern. Liber naturae, the volume of nature, is the idea that the natural world is a class of sacred text and that the revelation of its pregnant depends upon our willingness to read information technology carefully. Seen in this lite, the earth of the book and the book of the world are intimately related.
Of form, I'1000 no Muir, and I'grand more than Groucho than Karl. And this is a wide-open up desert with a m hazards. Information technology is true that I take on a number of occasions read myself into trouble while on the hoof—stepping onto harvester ant mounds or into basis squirrel tunnels or invading the space of Bang-up Basin rattlers. Merely most of the surprises that come up from simultaneous reading and hiking are good ones considering looking from the earth to the page and back again becomes a game of peekaboo: Now you don't see information technology, now you practise. I afternoon, I looked up from a volume to see a pronghorn cadet chiseled confronting a rocky ridgeline in a higher place me. That evening, as information technology became too dark to see the page, I lifted my head to witness the thinnest possible crescent moon, in close conjunction with Venus, floating above the summit ridge of my abode mountain.
When nosotros read a travel guidebook while walking in a city, or a natural history field guide in a forest, nosotros are considered normal. Information technology is understood that we demand the book to recognize and name the things of this globe and to prevent ourselves from becoming lost within it. Every bit I explained to Hannah, adept writing plays the same orienting role: Information technology can aid us discover where we are and reveal why our connections to each other and to the world nosotros walk through every twenty-four hour period are then precious in the commencement identify.
Though Hannah insists that I'm "totally not like other dads," she seemed convinced by my reasoning. "Yeah, Dad, I can see that," she said. "Now, what almost that no-pants thing?"
Copyright © 2014 past High State News (December ix, 2013), hcn.org.
Source: https://www.rd.com/article/reading-while-walking/
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