A Few Thoughts on Walking According to Thoreau

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.
They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.
Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular homebut equally at home everywhere.
For this is the secret of successful sauntering.
Walking by Henry David Thoreau, 1862

By Thoreau's definition of walking, that is to say sauntering, I'm a student just learning to tie the laces on my walking shoes. He believes proper walking, that is to say sauntering, requires a complete abandonment of things that restrict, things like expectations. 

I seem to have always had an expectation or a goal to meet, in a walk (or a run). I can't remember a time when I truly sauntered. 

By Thoreau's definition walking, that is to say sauntering, it is a spiritual quest; an opportunity to experience a deepening insight into one's moral, emotional, inner being. 

I expect this long walk will have some saunterest qualities to it but I know it will also be filled with hard physical work and demanding mental concentration for the moments at hand. Yet I see it also as a welcomed exit-ramp, a time to slow down and to stop, to pay attention to areas in my life that I've put on the back burner for a long time.  

One of my favorite quotes is by Mary Oliver, it loosely ties into Thoreau's tenet on intentionality. It's in the back of my mind always, and I suspect it will be front and center and leading the parade during my long walk:

 " What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?"

The Summer Day, 1990