When walking, just walk
A Buddhist slogan goes "When walking, just walk" or, in other words, "pay attention to the ever-changing sensations of the body as you walk." This principle can be equally extended to other activities: "When eating, just eat. When cooking, just cook. When standing, getting dressed, going to the toilet, doing the shopping, just pay attention to what you are doing." In theory, you could spend most of your day in this fashion.
But why would we do it? Part of the answer lies in the "just". By "just" eating, we inevitably diminish the habit of thinking about the past and future. If we find our thoughts oppressive, then it can be a great relief to focus instead on the simplicity of the present.
When we are "just" walking - when the movement of our bodies and the crunch of the gravel under our feet take centre stage in consciousness - a small miracle happens. For a few seconds at least, the other people in our lives vanish. The problems at work disappear. Our fatigue and grumpiness, not to mention horrible politicians and global warming, are all temporarily eclipsed by the sensations of the now.
To "just walk" can give us a welcome respite from compulsive thought, but this is hardly an adequate reason to do it for long. For most of us, our thoughts are not so painful and useless that we would want to endlessly avoid them.
Huang Po, the Zen master, gives another angle on "just walking". Enlightenment, he said, is nothing more than "chopping wood, and drawing water." Instead of trying to escape the tyranny of thought, Huang Po seems to be suggesting an intimate connection with nature instead.
When he is chopping wood, we can imagine him doing so in a serene, focused, fully conscious fashion (he is a Zen master, after all!). He strips the rotting bark from the pine logs. He shakes off the ants and feels the heft of his axe. Just before he strikes the log, he feels a gentle breeze on his face and he hears the rain approaching through the distant hills. Is that enlightenment? In any case, it would seem to be a marvellous way to live, if we really could.
This is the "don't forget to smell the roses" version of "being present". The assumption is that the miasma of compulsive thought prevents us from seeing the astonishing beauty of the everyday world.
Unfortunately the present moment, even when we see it with total clarity, is just as likely to be dull, repetitive and quite lacking in poetry. To add to the paradox, we can even have beauty and drudgery at the same time! If we adapted Huang Po's aphorism about chopping wood and drawing water to the modern day, we would have to say something like "switching on the stove, turning on the tap." It just doesn't have the same mystical ring to it!
So being present to escape thoughts is rather fearful and pessimistic in intention. Being present in order to smell the roses is also limited in scope, if rather more appealing. There is, however, another reason to "just walk", when we walk. If we pay attention to anything that we do, we soon start to do it so much better.
When we are dominated by thought, we tend to walk in a stiff, jerky, unconscious manner that compounds the accumulating tensions of the day. If we tune into our bodies, however, we can shed some of those tensions almost immediately, and move in a free, easy, flowing fashion. If we "just walk" when we walk, we can be relaxed, comfortable and grounded in our bodies every time we get to our feet.
By consciously walking, we not only feel better in the moment. We can also start to reverse the effects of ageing, and physically become younger. We know that walking is good for our health, but "being present" - the art of being fully attuned to what you are doing - brings a huge quantum leap in efficiency.
The bodies of old people are typically stiff, hard and inflexible. Muscles atrophy and lose their range of movement. Lung capacity shrinks steadily each year. Arteries get lined with concrete, and bones become brittle. The variation in heart rate between arousal and rest becomes more and more narrow. As we get older, our movements (as illustrated by the way we walk) become progressively stiffer, shorter and more jerky.
Children on the other hand have supple muscles that easily contract and relax to their full extent. They breathe with all of their lungs. Their bones will bend further before they snap. Their heart rate has high variability: they can go from 200 beats a minute to rest in almost no time at all. Their movements have an easy, rhythmic flow and bounce to them. And unlike old people, they positive exude a bodily sense of happiness and natural good health.
We tend to take our ability to walk for granted, which partly explains why old people are so depressed by the prospect of the zimmer frame or the wheelchair. In fact, walking on two feet is a remarkably complicated skill. We forget that it takes infants a least a year to learn how to do it. Walking is a tremendous feat of split-second co-ordination involving hundreds of muscles simultaneously.
Even the action of a single muscle group is profoundly complicated. To contract the biceps smoothly, for example, requires that the triceps counteract that movement by making exquisitely fine adjustments of tension within individual muscle fibres, microsecond by microsecond. Furthermore, both triceps and biceps are supported by deeper muscles in the chest and back, which also need to adjust appropriately. In fact, to smoothly contract the biceps even involves the core abdominal muscles that hold us upright, and the action of breathing.
Walking is a hundred times more complicated than tensing the biceps, so it is not surprising that we can lose the knack of moving in a graceful, easy fashion as we age. Fortunately, we can slow that decline, or even reverse it, if we choose to "just walk" when we walk.
It is always our choice where we direct our attention at any moment. If we walk to the shops thinking about our problems, we will probably walk in a somewhat rigid, automatic fashion. If our thoughts are particularly troublesome, we are also likely to be holding our breaths, knotting up in the stomach and frowning. If we habitually think like this, day after day, year after year, the tensions will become so ingrained that we will never relax completely, not even in sleep. As we lose that sense of ease and flow in the body, we grow old fast.
Walking consciously can reverse this process, and there are many ways to go about it. Firstly, it is good to remember that walking is a traditional meditation "posture" in the East. Thai forest monks will often amble to and fro along a 20-pace walking track in front of their huts. Zen practitioners often walk in step in a circle between sitting meditations. On one Zen retreat I attended, we were instead expected to run, rather than walk, up and down the little mountain nearby. On another retreat, we perfected the art of walking extremely slowly, taking half an hour to cross the hall. Similarly, Tai Chi can be regarded as being partly based on the standing and walking meditations of ancient Chinese culture.
But there is need to be so fancy. We all walk every day - across the room, up or down stairs, dawdling or hurrying. To "just walk" means to pay attention to what we are doing. This alone will make the action more efficient and satisfying, which in turn has a balancing effect on the mind.
Nonetheless, it wouldn't hurt to sigh a few times as we start to walk. Or breathe deeply as we stride through the park. Or systematically scan the body to release unnecessary tension. Or cultivate a smooth, flowing quality of movement. Or listen, or look, or smell as we walk (since the outer world is also part of the experience of walking). All of these options will augment the therapeutic effect of conscious walking.
In the first few seconds, we may realise that "just walking" is a pleasant diversion from our usual thoughts. We may also realise the street we are walking down has many small charms. However, we are unlikely to continue "just walking" for these reasons alone.
The real advantage is that the stiff, jerky, restless quality of automatic walking soon fades away. We may not be walking "perfectly", but the movement is likely to become smoother and more satisfying. Even an old man with his gammy knee can still walk in either a tense or a relaxed fashion. He can be unconsciously at odds with his body, or comfortably at ease within it. Whoever we are, at whatever age, regardless of our war-wounds, we can still consciously develop our innate sense of balance, muscle co-ordination and flow. And whatever is good for the body is also good for our mind.