A friend once told me about a guy who wanted to have sex with her feet. I’m not entirely sure what that means (what goes where exactly?), but it’s a problem I have not faced. My feet will never be propositioned. My feet inspire neither poetry nor the launching of ships. They are strictly functional, like power tools, and in their life of celibacy, they get to focus on what matters: I walk for at least an hour a day. When traveling, I love nothing more than walking through a new city, especially one like Tokyo or Buenos Aires that’s labyrinthine enough to get lost in. Walking through a new city, I imagine that the world is different from what I know it to be, that it’s unpredictable instead of repetitive, that I’m about to be floored by an encounter or an architectural anomaly or a street performer or a feeling.
“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” Nietzche wrote in Twilight of the Idols. Why do out-of-context Nietzche quotes make him sound like a frat boy who just read Siddhartha? But it’s true that walking settles my thoughts. I can’t talk on the phone without walking, or at least pacing. I’ve written whole stories in my head while walking. While walking, I have imaginary arguments with whomever I’m mad at and emerge victorious. I plan four-course meals. I fantasize full catch-up conversations with friends.
I love walking at night, though as a woman, I’d be enshrined as stupid were something to happen to me, so I mostly avoid night walks because who wants to leave a legacy of stupidity?
I love hiking, too, and have always felt drawn to those famous multi-day treks, like El Camino de Santiago or Everest Base Camp, but those experiences cost thousands and walking should be free. Plus, I’m no fan of sleeping outside. I’m a city girl at heart.
When I’m not traveling, I walk through my objectively ugly neighborhood. My neighborhood sits off the highway. It’s a collection of apartment buildings and townhouses and a Fairfield Inn and an Indian restaurant the size of a farm. There’s always an Amazon truck making deliveries and some construction vehicles whirring and beeping, and in the center of it all, there’s an eyesore of a playground. All playgrounds are eyesores, in part because they’re painted in primary colors, instead of the more logical choice, earth tones, but this one is especially ugly because it’s both sprawling and sparse.
I’ve lived in beautiful places—Colorado, the south of Mexico, a hot springs town in Wyoming where steam rose from the earth—but I’m cool with residing in ugliness. I kind of embrace the ugliness. I stroll through the wasteland listening to podcasts, observing, to quote The Waste Land, “a heap of broken images.” It’s my favorite part of the day.
Some of my favorite books center a narrator walking through an urban setting—Ulysses, The Odd Woman and The City, Catcher In the Rye. Cities are intense and I love intensity—food so spicy my vision blurs, music that lifts me out of my body, cult documentaries, The Bell Jar. I dislike whatever the opposite is, whatever takes the edge off. Recently, on assignment in a fancy hotel, I was shown the lobby’s “library,” where the old books had been ordered in bulk from some website that sells them that way—books chosen not for their words but for the aesthetic of their spines. Other things that dull my life force: botanical gardens, IKEA, fluorescent lighting, conversations about AI, music that comes from a DJ booth.
Anyway.
Nomadic cultures have dwindled since the 20th Century, largely because with the rise of technology, it’s become unnecessary to uproot seasonally, to walk in search of fields and pastures. But technological convenience gave rise to new nomads. While nomads traditionally traveled in groups, digital nomads travel alone. I don’t identify as a “digital nomad” (the epithet makes me feel like a bot), but I’ve lived in so many places, I’ve lost count. For years, I wandered from country to country, city to city, café to café, laptop in shoulder bag. I wasn’t looking for a place to grow crops. I’m not sure what I was looking for—maybe a mythical and permanent contentment. Walking is instinctive, the way sucking is in infancy: We know we want something. But where? But what?
When I was 20, a friend and I were in Istanbul, walking through an outdoor bazaar, when we came across a woman selling alarm clocks. She had set up at least a dozen on a blanket on the ground and all of them were going off. The cacophony was chaotic and it made us laugh.
“What if this is a dream?” I said. “What if our alarm clocks are going off and we’re about to wake up?”
I remember we wound up in a strip club that night where the women stripped down to sensible underwear. I remember a boat ride on the Bosphorous Strait, and how exhilarating it was to hover between continents. I remember discovering Turkish Delight and the powdered sugar dusting my T-shirt. I remember an upside-down Medusa head inside an ancient cistern. I remember standing in a palace, looking up, jaw dropped.
I don’t remember why we decided to travel together; we weren’t particularly close. But every new-city walk hurtles me back, to being kids who got to feel like adults, who found blaring alarms amusing instead of annoying, who wore their backpacks with both straps, who were awed by the streets of Istanbul. I remember the alarms fading behind us. And then Turkey did, and then my 20s did. I’ve seen many palaces now, and I no longer find them beautiful; I see ostentation, unchecked wealth, the hoarding of resources. Somewhere along the way, my jaw stopped dropping.
Last week, walking from the shower to the bedroom, I felt a twinge, and then my whole lower back clenched up like a fist.
Trapped in bed, I was Googling, what to do when you throw your back out.
Get out of bed, said Google.
Right.
I kept looking longingly at the windows. It occurred to me, the way it does when something is taken, how lucky I am, to walk every day, to live every day. I wanted to walk past the rows of identical townhouses. I wanted to walk past the gross pond with the garbage in it where people are always fishing for some reason. I longed for the sameness, the ugliness.
From bed, I remembered: What great fortune it is to feel free.
Love,
Diana
P.S. I was a guest on Greg Olear’s Prevail podcast last week, talking about writing and travel and politics. Check it out!
P.P.S. A prompt: Write an essay in three parts—a memory of freedom, a memory of confinement, and a wish. How might you braid them together on the page?
P.P.P.S. What’s your preferred mode of transportation through the world? Let me know in the comments.
P.P.P.S. I’ll be leading a writing retreat in Ashville in April and I’d love for you to be there.
This is such a beautifully written piece and a proper ode to walking. I really enjoyed it, thank you so much.
My most favorite activity is walking the streets of a city in a foreign country. The novelty never gets old! Thanks for the read.