How to Take a Walk
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I met a woman from New York who was visiting SF. We both had been to Burning Man. She expressed her distaste at how much time San Franciscans spend on their art projects. According to her, New Yorkers "have a life".
So, that bar conversation ended pretty quickly. But later on I got to thinking about it. There might be positive senses of "having a life", but I think she meant it in the more common way -- a horror of getting too enthusiastic about anything.
Oh yeah, we could plant a rose garden in our backyard, but you know, we have lives.
It makes me feel tired just contemplating it.
I also get terribly infuriated by this. It reminds me of being in high school when any display of creativity or intelligence was frowned upon.
It's too bad the guy did the illumination with LEDs, instead of using matches for that, too. (Although that would have worked only once.)
Building something, even an Eiffel tower out of match sticks, is accomplishing something. How valuable or useful that something is is debatable, and there are probably better things to build then a match-stick tower, but it is still an accomplishment it adds to the world in a way that watching TV never will.
I will admit to watching TV and enjoying it, but I consider it an indulgence. I always have something better to do, and I think that is true of nearly everyone.
But of course watching something can "accomplish something" -- it can broaden your experience of reality by showing you something that took place on the other side of the world, or ten years ago.
The best television shows you moments of life that otherwise only the people who were actually present might have had a chance to see.
Well, at least nobody beat me with a stick.
P.S. I also, from time to time, enjoy watching TV. Don't judge. ;-)
(Just submitted it as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1591218 )
For most of my friends these days, "a life" is a wife and kids, but for some of them, it's just a house, or pets, or even a job.
Strangely, "a life" never stops them from having dinner with you or meeting for beers after work. It just stops them from doing anything that requires energy or planning. It's got to the point where I'm trying to figure out how to make new friends at an age where it doesn't happen by accident. But you find a guy whose Facebook page says "I love backpacking" and then you find out he hasn't done it once since he got married. I'm going out with women I'm not into just so I have somebody to do something with. I'd be too scared to get seriously involved with them, though, because then they would have a "life."
Excellent insight. I was trying to articulate what having-a-life really means. So in this sense, having-a-life means that your duties are supposed to be active, but your entertainments are passive.
If your entertainments are active, perhaps the implication is that you must be a loser in the other areas -- not accruing enough status, money, friends, etc., since you have energy left over. And that isn't completely untrue; sacrifices are necessary for any project. (Although, for me, it has always been the stuff that I did for no good reason which brought me the best jobs and the strongest relationships).
But if someone has no dreams apart from passive entertainments... I don't know how they even get through the day.
It's funny, I always think the opposite. Whenever I'm working hard at my job during the week and then just eating and drinking with friends on the weekends, I feel like don't "have a life." I do these things most often for lack of other opportunities, and then I start to feel don't have anything more interesting to do than eat and drink and talk. At these junctures, I start thinking more about potential activities, projects and travel opportunities in order to get my "life" going again.
Clubs (not the music type), Meetup.com, user groups.
Do it during lunch, after work, after dinner. On the weekend , for a longer walk. Parks and trails work best. Less crowded streets in the city work as well.
Don't rush, just walk slowly.
Observe things.
If you end up thinking about the problem your are working on, that's fine, if you notice a bird's nest, that's fine too.
Walk like you have no place to be, look around. You will feel weird at first, but that's fine. Try not to care about that.
Think of it as something between meditation, relaxation and exercise. Sort of a all-in-one.
It's easy. There is nothing you have to do to plan for it, no special gear to buy, all you need to do is to say "I want to take a walk" and then ... take a walk.
When someone provides a plan, for some reason I am compelled to follow it meticulously or reject it entirely. I could use an Ask HN on how to loosen up.
Also look up. In city streets there are things to see above the horizontal plane we strongly tend to confine our view to.
I used to have a balcony over a very crowded alley with constant foot traffic. I would stand there quietly and watch people think they were alone in this alley all the time.
Drunk people were the best. One corner of the alley was constantly getting pee'd in so they installed a metal skirt that bounced the pee back on the pee'r. You could watch drunk people pee in that corner then walk away with a wet pant leg without ever noticing. Hilarious. And not once in the 3 years I lived there did someone look up.
1) It doesn't solve the problem at all as the drunks don't even notice the deterrent 2) If the drunks were aware enough to notice, they could simply pee at an angle to avoid backsplash - but I imagine they'd be too drunk to think of that simple solution
2.) It is really funny to look straight up at the sky in a busy street and then watch twenty other people start looking up, wondering what could possibly be going on up there.
Now I live in the outskirts of Portland, in a place with modern suburbs grown up around a quaint old town. Sidewalks are everywhere. I take walks all the time, and I see other people out for walks daily.
It's seems like common sense that urban and neighborhood design can have a huge impact on the livability of an area, but a lot of the suburbs created in the US abandoned the sidewalk to save a few bucks and cram more houses per acre. I don't know if the tide has turned, but I'd never live in a neighborhood without sidewalks again.
Home buying tip: Look for a neighborhood with a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. It's a small detail that has a big impact on "neighborhood" feel.
Oddly enough, a lot of the neighborhoods weren't tightly packed. The lot sizes were decent and the house-to-house spacing was ample. I'm guessing it was more of an issue where, if the builders didn't have to spend money on sidewalks, they didn't.
Portland is not a good example of American urban planning gone awry. As it's probably one of the most sensible cities in the US.
And yes, unfortunately neighborhoods without sidewalks are all too common in American suburbs.
I suspect it's that way most places, and that's why you find so few without sidewalks. They do exist, though.
Mostly, but there's really 2 Portlands. Downtown & the eastside are dense, mostly flat, walkable and with excellent public transit. The west side is hilly, mostly suburban, and generally neither walking nor transit friendly.
It should be said that when some of these neighborhoods were laid out, most families had at most one car, and that car commonly smaller than some of the sports utes and minivans one sees today, leaving more space on the pavement for pedestrians.
A sidewalk is not always needed to have a good walk.
The area was built up in the 1920s, and apparently at the time it was left to the homeowners on each block whether they wanted to pay for sidewalk construction. Most blocks paid for it but the homeowners on this street did not.
It's just a lot more walkable here. In Pamplona I could walk out my front door and be blasted with the fact that I was in a medieval walled city with cobbled streets and narrow alleyways. Any direction I went had some guaranteed Cool Stuff to pass by and probably would end me up perched on some 600 year old military fortification looking out over the farms.
Contrast that to living in a typical LA suburb with no sidewalks and nothing to see apart from apartment complexes and possibly a Starbucks if you press on far enough. It sorta sucks the fun out of the experience.
I've definitely done my share of walking in the 'states too, but then I've made a point of living in some pretty walkable places. NW Portland and Venice spring to mind as places I spent a ton of time simply wandering around.
Other places I've lived... San Gabriel, Tigard, Gresham... Not much walking.
I think maybe it has more to do with where you are than who you are.
It's somewhat common in some areas in the US, and literally unthinkable in Europe. I am lucky that I live in San Francisco now, where most of the city (besides some areas I found between the Sunset and Glen Park) has sidewalks. In fact, the first think I heard about SF before moving here was that it is 'very walkable'
My impression is that the tendency is somewhat reversing. I am an spoiled Franciscan now, so I don't know how is it on other parts of the country, but I have been hearing more and more people talking about moving closer to their offices (when they can) and walking or biking to work. Again, this is from a pure SF perspective, not sure how is it on other places in the US.
P.S. Gosh, I love Pamplona, you are lucky. The txistorras are one the best unknown meals in the world.
There has even been an excellent book published about San Francisco's stairways: Stairway Walks in San Francisco by Adah Bakalinsky. There is also a good web site: http://www.sisterbetty.org/stairways/
I don't think it's just a function of the distance but the frequency and the empty mind you report is pretty close to describing meditation - empty mind observing - great stuff.
A few quick adds, since I seem to have mildly offended some of you.
0. The tangent on "having a life" here is fascinating. Nothing to add, but I am now seriously curious about the ethnography of that phrase.
1. Is this anti-American? I don't really think so. There is research (see Robert Levine, "The Geography of Time") that shows that cultures have characteristic tempos, down to typical walking speeds. Yes, the vastness of America has something to do with it, but I think 80% of the dynamics are social, not physical, and also relatively recent (cellphones etc. have helped Americans express this preference a lot more clearly). Back before Thoreau's time, I think this wasn't so characteristic of America. There are no better celebrations of idleness than the works of that uber-American writer, Mark Twain. The disease is fairly new.
2. "If you are thinking about blogging about your judgments of how others are not taking a walk, then YOU are not taking a walk." Very fair and Godelian critique, but I am talking about idle foot-and-mind wandering here, not meditation. I'll leave that kind of walking to the Zen monks. My model isn't a Zen monk, it is Tom Sawyer walking along kicking a can or something. The xkcd Bored with the Internet strip http://xkcd.com/77/ is sort of my point as well, except that I still take walks anyway, despite the irony.
3. If I came across as judgmental or telling people how to actually take walks... sorry. Meant to be mostly tongue-in-cheek :) Poor writing execution, not intent.
When I had some time in the evenings to come up with material I would sit at home without much inspiration. However, I found that when I walked to the convenience store to get a snack, I would inevitably return with at least one new joke idea, maybe more.
Walking was such a predictably good way to loosen up my creativity that when I got stuck I would head for the door and tell my wife, "I'm going to the convenience store to buy a joke."
What a great meta-punchline. :)
"Some people walk in the rain, and some people just get wet."
Be someone who walks in the rain.
"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."
I find more enjoyment in a simple hike through a forest than I've had at work for a very long time. Also, I find that when I go back to work after a trip to the forest or even just a walk outside the city, I feel better and am less crabby about going back to work. I think this is something that is sorely lacking in many people's lives. Not recreation but just being out in whatever wild we have left. Aaand now I sound like a crazy hippie.
The author is correct observing nobody walking any more. I see a lot of runners who I join occasionally and the only consistent walkers the elderly (fit) and ethnic (fit). Why? Well people don't see the value in it and simply write it off as wasted time. Here's the thing, the benefits are cumulative so it might appear a waste of time but the advantages (fitness, psych, clean air, thinking) roll on, the more consistent you are.
[0] Last year I clocked up 2000K ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157623445003205... This year I walked 240km from Canberra to Mt.Kosciuszko (9 days) ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/collections/7215762379... This month I covered all of the city of Singapore on foot in 2 days ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/collections/7215762454...
[1] Because every time I saved up enough money for a car I bought a new PC.
> If you pass anybody, you are not walking slowly enough for it to be “taking a walk.”
There are people around who walk painfully slowly. When I go for a walk, I let my legs swing at a natural cadence, with my natural stride length. If I have to change that, to ensure I don't overtake some dawdler, it places a stupidly unnecessary restriction on the definition of "taking a walk". IMO, it removes some of the idleness from it if you have to actually think about how you are walking.
i.e. You can only be classed as "taking a walk", if you are the slowest person around, or if the only people slower than you are far enough away that you won't catch them up.
This makes it extremely difficult to take a walk, particularly if you start anywhere near an old people's home, or a primary school, or an area of town where lost tourists peer down each side street in search of a landmark. Note that this is in the paragraph that declares "taking a walk" to be "not difficult".
Taking a walk by my definition - walking at my body's natural pace, aiming for nowhere in particular - is easy. His definition makes it very difficult indeed.
> If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and don’t listen to music.
I tend to never listen to music unless I'm taking a walk. I have no anxiety about idleness, but I do have an acute anxiety about others' opinions of my taste in music—it is such that I can only stand to enjoy music when there is no one close enough to me to hear it. Seeing as I live in an apartment with thin walls, this means going for a walk.
To pull that off, you need thick skin or thick walls.
However it is a good idea to walk without ipods/mp3 players as much as you can bear, walking helps your mind wander or meditate without having to 'learn how to breathe'.
Where in the world does this man take walks? Down the median of I-5?
I have a hard time coming up with a reason that "taking a walk" must exclude walking the dog; taking with a friend; even chatting on the phone, though that's not my habit. Nor can I see why one may not pass anybody--in a walking part of the world does one end up with large queues of walkers with the tail end going slower and slower?
I write this having just walked in to work, a bit less than an hour, right around half an hour slower than riding the bus. Yes it is purposeful, but it is not the most time-efficient way of accomplishing the purpose.
They're also good for just relaxing.
I suspect Smoking works the same way.
The author has clearly never lived in Texas during the summer. (A decent-length leisurely walk around Austin at midnight during this time of the year will inevitably result in more than enough sweat.)
Edit: I live in Tennessee.
If you walk slowly enough, you won't sweat. Or maybe that's just Austin.
- Seneca
Something about the scale of the American suburb makes walking totally infuriating for me. I need the wind in my hair and the landscape sliding by to really relax - inching by the same cookie-cutter houses every day kills me.
I enjoy walking in the city or the park, but I can't just impromptu do that.
What I don't see is why it had to have an anti-American bias. It doesn't help make your point, and all it does is antagonize your American readers. I am an American, I also take walks.
I think part of the point is that there is something deep-seeded in our culture that punishes idleness. That is the social anxiety he describes. I do have a little anxiety when I'm going for a walk, alone, not particularly doing or thinking anything. Will people think I'm some sort of weirdo? The observation that this worry is itself worrisome is an observation I can identify with.
I observed the same thing. I have lived half my life here, half in Eastern Europe. I remember we used to take walks with my family after dinner growing up. Here in US it is harder because it is so unusual. I guess life is faster paced, but I think at some point it becomes counter-productive.
Being fast-paced works very well for manual labor, not for problem solving. Hard problems can only be solved on a clear, rested mind, sometime a walk does just that.
It seems more like it's tied to the importance placed on property ownership and lack of public common spaces. (Well, there's probably a feedback loop going on) We convince ourselves that owning a home in the suburb is so important and so wonderful that naturally we stay at home and enjoy our house.
Needless to say, all of us back home were appalled by this apparently fearful and paranoid US cultural trait.
The incident began at 5 p.m. when a resident reported a man wandering around a low-income, predominantly minority neighbourhood several blocks from the oceanfront, looking at houses.
(...)
"What is your name, sir?" the officer asked.
"Bob Dylan," Dylan said.
"OK, what are you doing here?" the officer asked.
"I'm on tour," the singer replied.
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2009/08/15/dylan-police.h...
The very concept of a lake closing, never mind at 6pm on a summer evening (easily light out until 10:30), was alien to my Irish mind.
Meanwhile, there was an article in the Guardian, about whether or not it's OK to go wild camping:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/09/holidays-w...
Similarly, the notion that going to a campsite could be described as camping was weird. I view campsites as more like unpleasant cheap muddy hotels - I grew up understanding one of the appeals of camping is being in the middle of nowhere, with nobody around. The idea of having other people, music, barbequeues, people drinking etc. all around sounds horrible to me.
Just about everywhere else in the Highlands I've never had any problems wild camping or staying in bothies (http://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/).
The US is a big place, about 100 times the size of Ireland. Neighborhoods differ. Please don't judge an entire population because of what happened in one suburb. In other places in the US you'd have people waving hello to you.
I'm sure I could walk through parts of Derry and have a dismal experience, but that shouldn't be used to judge all of the Irish.
I have no idea what it's like in Derry, FWIW, as I've never been up north.
I wonder if he thinks he looks like a native-born or an immigrant?
Conversely, take a native born person of Japanese or Indian descent, and send them to Japan or India. The natives there will be able to tell he isn't native born.
A friend of mine who traveled to Central Asia was struck by how balanced people appeared; he found Westerners take up "too much space" in their movements, and East Asian people tended to do the opposite. But at least during his stay in Central Asia, he noticed the people there repeatedly showed an unconscious balance in their body language: neither too loud and aggressive, nor too quiet and subdued.
If you see me on the street, I believe you will see my family culture (Chinese) and where I was brought up (American Midwest). You will not see where I was born (East Coast).
And I'm talking about a relatively easy case of Chinese vs American. Are you going to tell me you can tell a Canadian-born person from an American-born at a glance?
Yes, many times you can tell where someone is from because of stereotypical cultural things that are difficult to hide. But to assume you can go for a walk and identify with certainty who is American born and who is not is ridiculous.
There are studies (see Robert Levine, "Geography of Time") that use normal walking pace as a very characteristic indicator of geographic origin.
The FBI caught Adolf Eichmann in Argentina partly because they noticed his dissonant walking pace :)
Venkat
I am not offended, that sentence rubbed me the wrong way. I agree that most certainly culture affects our activities, even to the point of how we do seemingly simple things. But the culture you have and the place where you are born are very different things. Ask anyone who is born into a displaced family that preserves their original culture.
I am an American-born Chinese person that takes walks. When you see me and my wife strolling, at that moment, you are seeing my culture (that enjoys "san-bu") not my birth place.
Abraham Cahan, _The Rise of David Delinsky_, published 1920s, set in the New York of the late 1800s & early 1900s.
not a touch on Ed Stafford: 859 days & 4,000 miles of walking the entire Amazon ~ http://www.walkingtheamazon.com/ but looking at the shots, beautiful scenery. Envious.
The last few paragraphs were the most interesting in my opinion if you don't have the time to read it all.
summary for the lazy hackers / if you don't have the time to read it all
Had to laugh when I read this though, since this article is in so many ways talking about the same ones that will read that summary and click on to some other article on here.
Walking as the author describes is one of those simple pleasures that we have been gifted, but so few of us ever slow down to realize it and to receive it.
I believe this is quite similar to bringing your mind back to the breath in sitting meditation in Vipassana and similar practices, though others may correct me. The difference here is that it's perhaps somehow more obvious when your mind has strayed from its object. In fact, there are forms of walking meditation in Vipassana and other practices. These focus -- again, I believe -- much more on the walking: the walking and its sensations are the object. Generally you would walk up and down a short stretch; this avoid the worry of a route, or how to return to the starting point.
In much the same way that starting the day with breakfast gives my days a sense of rhythm, walking once a week gives my weeks a good demarcation.
I take "walks", however not in the sense of the article. I find that a walk before work is great and on your lunch if you have had a crappy morning. However I walk with a purpose, I think about thinks I see, get my brain interested in stuff I wouldn't usually think about. It gives inspiration and helps figure out problems that otherwise seemed impossible to overcome.
In New York I would take the A train from Washington Heights to Columbus Circle, and either walk up to the Metropolitan Museum, or down to the Village. It was endlessly entertaining, with sights and sounds to fill the mind.
What a joy.
He takes walks with 100% attention to the immediate sensual inputs. It's basically a kind of meditation.
walking meditation what it is usually called, but i love the term "presence walk".
I just have a lot to do, and when I do have downtime, I prefer to spend it on sites like Hacker News. That's all.
I think what I really like is the going somewhere part in general, although not necessarily somewhere in particular.
Walking in itself is one of the more pleasant ways of going somewhere nonparticular.
This isn't a hack. It's an activity. I can't think of any conceivable definition of "hack" that this article would also fit.
This is just as much a hack as articles about exercise or nutrition are a hack. They hack the hackers, who ... hack.
Hack your commute, take public transit! Hack your next dinner party with parlour games. Delightfully clever key hack keeps all your keys on the same ring. Hack Mexican food with a "burrito" sized tortilla! Hack your brain with REM sleep. Hack the sun with a straw hat. Hack hygiene with silver oxide "deodorant". Hack girls with compliments. Hack your windowsill with a pot of wheatgrass, and hack the sky with the goddamn moon.
It's stupid. Take a walk.
Good idea ;-)
Thus, learning to play guitar is not a hack, since it satisfies neither criteria, but learning to put some TP into the toilet first when you do #2 in order to prevent splashback is a hack.
When new things come out or new ideas emerge people just 'hack' them and viscerally create. Hey I need this form, bust it out. Hey I need this renderer, bust it out.
But later as things are more known you might abstract away and say let's take a step back and look at the architecture of this whole thing rather than bust it out in a prototypical fashion (usually because the problem is complex or stuff is broken and a maintenance nightmare with steep technical debt). You might even architect the plan for what prototypes you would make to help solve the problems.
So true things being architected are happening more frequently as a buzz but as systems mature that is usually what happens via abstraction to see the full picture.
Maybe the difference is a 'hack' is something I am doing right now until it works, almost a prototype. Then something 'architected' is what you would do when you think about it for a week or two before starting. Lots of software development for instance starts with hacks/prototypes then architects how to use those to go to production.
Both sides are representations of the poles of creating, of course you can go way beyond either side and eat some spaghetti hacks or go to space with some architecture astronauts.
I hacked my feet with shoes so I can walk for longer on rougher terrains.