If Eskimos have a hundred words for snow (I know, they don't really), Bostonians have twice that many for slush – most of them unprintable. Aside from one or two enlightened raised crosswalks (mostly in The Peeps Republic of Cambridge, natch), six months out of the year you can’t cross the street without your high waders on. Which is why there is an odd pleasure in mastering walking in Boston.



I've always been a walker.  Of course, most of humanity was until fairly recently.  Now they are mostly circle-around-until-you-find-a-parking-space-close-to-the-entrancers.  Seriously.  Friends of the Blog may recall when my aunt came out to visit.  We walked from Long Wharf to the Common on a leisurely summer day, and it was like a death march for her.  Most Americans can still walk, it's true.  But not much.

What separates real urbanites from the rest is not our wit and charm (I know, surprising) — it's really our love of walking. We know that drivers, who think they own the streets, are really just day-trippers, tourists in the wide scheme of things.  They stream in from the suburbs in the morning, park in a garage, go to work, maybe leave the office briefly for lunch — never more than a block or two — and stream back out in the late afternoon. 

Only a few choice American Cities today are truly for walkers — and again, I'm not talking about folks looking for a cardio workout.  Walking is not just a sport, it's The Sport of Philosophers.  As I've written before...

Man would not have philosophy without bipedal ambulation. If he could fly he would have no need of it. Likewise, if he had never left the sea. Socrates was forever walking on the beach trying out his method on the impressionable youths of Athens. Kant’s neighbors could set their watches by his afternoon walks. Schopenhauer, one of my personal favorites, emulating Kant, never missed his two-hour afternoon stroll. Kierkegaard famously wrote: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts.” Nietzsche went further: “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”

The Philosopher’s Walk in Kyoto, Japan, is thus named for philosopher Kitaro Nishida’s contemplative strolls along its magical, cherry-tree-lined paths . There are, of course, schools of Eastern thought devoted entirely to ambulation. Qigong, for example.

And when you think about it, walking is deserving of attention. It’s no small feat, walking as we do. It is, in fact, the single most defining feature of all human ancestry. There are very few other creatures on earth who can do it. Bipedal octopuses can, and do, although I don’t know what sort of philosophers they are. The problem with chimpanzees is that they can’t extend their knee-joints to produce a straight leg in the stance phase, which may be why, although they’re pretty smart, they have not produced many philosophers themselves.

I started thinking about walking again when the snow made it impossible to ride my bike to work (even with the tire chains on).  I thought about taking the T — I live about a block away from the Fenway stop — but it's actually a marvelous walk from where I live to where I work, and it would take me roughly the same amount of time — forty to forty-five minutes — on foot. 

My walking route takes me along the Emerald Necklace, through the Northeastern Campus (such as it is), down the Southwest Corridor Park, to the narrow streets of the South End.  The subway, on the other hand, offers a dank, crowded metal tube stuffed with misery jerking in fits and starts through a hole in the ground.  Tough choice, I know.

Cycling has been my first choice — for sheer efficiency — for ages.  I've been cycling to work so long now that I had forgotten the peculiar frame of mind a brisk, long walk puts you in.  It is an utterly different experience from even riding a bike.  There is something about walking that sets the mind in motion like nothing else can.  About five minutes into it, it really was as if a motor in my brain had kicked in and the gears started turning. I could almost hear the little hamsters in their madly spinning wheels!  That's how real it was!

I don't think it would be too much to call it an altered state.  Certainly a heightened state.  And it makes you wonder — while some of humankind continues on up the road of evolution at a slow and steady pace — are the others, in their mobile lay-z-boys, rushing off to oblivion? 

Because, as we all know by now, the things they sell us to make us more efficient, nine times out of ten end up weighing us down. It's well-known fact that our dependence on technology to get us where we're going — both mentally and physically — often has unintended consequences. Television can take us to the ends of the earth without our having to move a muscle. Consequently, we don't.  Or take smart phones. The phone may be brilliant, but the person using it?  Um, not so much.

Who knows but that there will come a day when many humans can’t extend their knee-joints to produce a straight leg in the stance phase. 

Enjoy it while you can.