Walking: One Step at a Time

Professor Rory Wilson of Swansea University has researched the degree to which illness, hormones, nutrition and emotions affect the movements of both humans and cockroaches.

Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, was stranded from September 1704 to 2 February 1709 on one of the Juan Fernández islands off the coast of Chile.

‘Imagine you close your eyes and open them again in twenty years. What would you be happy to see?’

I’ve been on short walks; I’ve been on long walks. I’ve walked from villages and to cities. I’ve walked through the day and through the night, from lovers and to friends. I have walked in deep forests and over big mountains, across snow-covered plains and through urban jungles. I have walked bored and euphoric and I have tried to walk away from pro

letting your body travel at the same speed as your soul.

The answers mirror a longing to feel that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Not only society, which is important enough, but something more. Nature has its own intelligence. In school, I learned that the spiritual was the opposite of the material, but in the woods these two are not opposites – they are equals. To walk reflects this.

Back at home, returned to civilization, daily life takes over with surprising speed. Pleasures become more complicated, often less intense and more to be expected. Over the course of a few days, grand sensations – such as feeling full or warm, sleeping well, or seeing another human being – are taken for granted.

‘I got lost here before, so now I know where we are.’

Philosophically, there is a chasm between the impossible and the fantastically unlikely.’