First one foot. Then the other. Walking is perhaps the ultimate metaphor for survival, which is why there are so many idiomatic expressions about it: 

• One step at at time

• One foot in front of the other

• Baby steps

• A walk in the park

• Walk a fine line 

• Walking on eggshells

• Walk a mile in someone’s shoes

And so on down the road, so to speak … 

If there was ever a time to be musing on the way forward, it feels like this very moment. It has been a strange summer, one in which it was difficult to take many steps at all because for most of the time it felt like going for a stroll in an oven. This might be understandable in a place that is known for heat, like south Texas or the Sahara desert, but not in, say, Britain, Austria, Slovakia, and Hungary. But they, too, reached into record highs as the El Niño system took shape this summer. Even Spain, already a warm place, stayed uncomfortably above average into the dwindling days of August.

My effort to escape Korea’s heat by decamping to Europe mostly failed. It also rearranged a bit how I feel about travel and tourism. It was too hot to walk. It was too hot to think. Tourist attractions without AC or shade held limited appeal. Ice cream intake tripled. It became difficult to focus on much beyond buying the next bottle of water. It certainly felt impossible to think about much at all, while at the same time having a deep, nagging feeling that this is our future. 

I abandoned my intended plan of a serious engagement with the rise and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — I just wanted frozen drinks and to lie down in a cool, darkened room. It was such a disappointment to forego these new historical horizons, as well as culinary ones. No deep red wine and hearty goulash. Maybe next time. 

I think about walking a lot, in part because walking enables my thinking. I’m sure this is a result of growing up in a part of the world that seemed actively hostile to the idea of anyone walking anywhere, ever. I even had my own car by the time I was 16, which was absolutely the norm in small-town Georgia and now quite absurd when I think about it in more global terms. In my generous parents’ defence, there was no public transportation beyond school buses, no Ubers (though there must have been at least one cab company), and certainly no trains or metros. 

When I took my first real wanderings, they were in London on my junior year abroad, the winter and spring of 1997. This was the bright dawn of the technological age, when brick-sized mobile phones dialled up the exciting possibilities but the people who are currently tweaking today’s social media hellscape algorithms probably weren’t even born yet. That moment soon passed, but in the cold, dark December of 1996 what it meant was that I had to buy an A-Z. My dad used one on his many work travels to the UK, but it was well-thumbed and I wanted my own fresh copy. For anyone unfamiliar with the London A-Z, it is a very detailed, gridded street map of what is an enormous urban area of 1,450 square  miles.

 When setting out somewhere, you look up the street in the index and then find the corresponding page and grid reference to pinpoint the location. The A-Z is printed in a book format so it can be carried in a bag quite easily, rather than the sort of map that has to be unfolded and — in my case at least — can never be returned to its folded state quite as neatly again. Basically, the A-Z was a piece of analog cartographical genius. Armed with such a trusted guide, I set forth on adventures across the city. What it really meant was that I could wander at will. If I wanted to know my location, I had a little book that could show me. 

What I really discovered as I explored the secret alleys and hidden corners of London is that walking is a form of thinking, at least for me. Writing is too, but that took a bit longer to figure out. Being able to wander at will through one of the world’s greatest cities at the grand age of 20 was undoubtedly a privilege, but it was one that, I hope, has served the work I do today.

Now I find that I don’t wander much at all. I plot, plan, decide a route, follow Google, and rarely let myself go off-road. My A-Z is in a box in storage while we live in a completely different city that I navigate with an app called Naver. I suspect that part of my attitude now is function of age, up to a point. I was never warned that the time for wandering disappears, much like the reading time that fills up childhood and early adolescence. Seemingly unplanned activities like lazing around the house reading a book or going for a long, wandering walk now require planning — and probably Google maps. 

Some of this is age, some of it is modern life. It’s almost impossible to think about the problems of the present, walking or not. The heat. AI possibly destroying human life, soon. The mess in the US. Inflation. Iran. Gaza. All of it, all of the time. Sitting means stewing in it, and the cortisol produced by the stress, anger, and frustration. Walking helps me digest everything. Not solve all the problems, not make them go away. I realise I’m speaking as someone with good mobility, fitness, and health, but when I say walking I mean movement of any sort. Getting out of your head and into your body, whatever that means. I’m not an evolutionary biologist by any stretch, but humans had to move to survive. We still do. 

The final stop of my six-week European sojourn ended with a five-day walking trip along the north Norfolk coast, in East Anglia. The weather had returned to something more normal for England, so it was warm but not hot, with one day of spitting rain (inevitable) and one day of significant wind gusts (also inevitable where the North Sea is concerned). My dear friend Lisa and I walked the first half of the trail, covering over 40 miles on the coastal path and around 65 in total when accounting for all the poking around village churches and strolling to lovely dinners after the day’s hike. We strode along sandy beaches, skirted salt marshes, and soldiered on a patch of shingle in a crosswind. All the while we had meandering conversations, while taking in the changing landscape and watching birds soar above us. 

It was a reassuring reminder of the how meeting two basic human needs — to move and to be heard — can power us on at times of great fear and uncertainty. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time. 

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What I’m … watching: Breakdown 1975

I happened to watch this documentary by chance about a month ago, and it’s stuck in my mind ever since. I have always suspected that the roots of today’s malaise can be found in the 1970s, though I’ve not had a lot of time in recent years to do much reading or digging around on this theme. This documentary mostly focuses on movies and TV culture, but that is a useful prism for refracting the shifting and uncertain world of 1975. I was born the following year, and although I was too young to remember the 70s, the chaos of that period seems in some way to have resurfaced today. This documentary does a good job at tracing those connections and is well worth a watch on Netflix. 

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