Let's talk about walking.
Henry David Thoreau in the modern world.
I recently spent a week up in the misting mountains of Sa Pa, Vietnam thinking, reading, and finishing the first draft of my new novel. One piece I came across stood out among the rest: Henry David Thoreau’s Walking.
Cliche, I know, but sometimes cliches are cliches for good reason.
Thoreau begins the essay with an intense etymological breakdown of the word sauntering. He hones in on two distinct, though related, interpretations of the word’s linguistic origins:
à la Sainte Terre → to the Holy Land
sans terre → having no home
He prefers the second definition, and so do I. This idea of having no home perfectly encapsulates the core ethos of my life right now. It’s exactly why I felt the need to hit the open road and live as a nomad with no end in sight.
A man of the road is a man of the world. Having no home means finding home wherever you happen to be. This is 100% how nomading around from city to city, living in a different country every other month has felt for me thus far.
“If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.” — Henry David Thoreau
I had to be willing to give up everything I’d once held sacred about my life to “be ready to walk”, or in this case, to be ready to live nomadically.
And that’s what I did.
I opened myself up to the possibility of getting truly lost. I opened myself to the unknown of what lies around the next corner, through the forest, or in the next country. Taking a walk, or living out of a backpack, is nothing more than this acceptance of the unknown.
It’s terrifying, yes, but that’s living. Man was not built to be domesticated, to behave and go to an office every day and watch what he thinks and says out of fear of having it all taken from him.
Man was created to live and explore. His core function is to do.
Thoreau believes that this domestication and bastardization of Man as a species can be symbolized in our towns and cities. They remove us from who we truly are and who we were born to be. Walking is the most effective tool to return to this natural state, he believes, and men who walk are by default members of the highest social class.
No matter where you happen to be right now, get out into the world. Go to the middle of nowhere and just walk. Walk aimlessly. Walk for the sake of walking. Just walk. And soon enough, it will hit you.
You’re no longer in America or Vietnam or Spain or wherever else anymore, but the world instead. You’re walking the paths of great and terrible men before, of the nameless animals and countless herds, extinct or otherwise, and God’s harshest disasters and greatest miracles—this, this is our core reason for being.
This is Man’s raison d’être.