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Walking is back! From New York Times articles to TikTok travel diaries, people everywhere are talking about the psychological benefits of simply putting one foot in front of the other and not stopping until a difficult truth – often about oneself – has revealed itself.
I’ve been following Craig Mod’s poetic ruminations on his walks around Japan for some time now. Just last week, Craig wrote at length about why he does continuous uninterrupted solo walks:
“The uninterrupted continuousness is critical. As soon as you get in a car or hop on a train, the strange spell of the walk is broken. The point of the continuous uninterrupted walk is to be ensorcelled by its strangeness, to fully inhabit the walk and engage with what the walk delivers, good and bad. …[It’s] the easiest way to inhabit some form of self-conversation, or rather, there is a conversation the road wants to have with you, and you can only hear it when you’re alone.”
Craig’s newsletter was the perfect prelude to a beautiful essay I read over the weekend: Nick Hunt’s Traveling At The Speed Of The Soul. As Hunt reflects on his 4,000km journey from the coast of Holland to the capital of Turkey, he turns to other writers and philosophers to understand why the slow pace of walking has such transformative power.
While neither he nor I believe in souls (not eternal ones, anyway), I loved the idea of the soul travelling at the speed of walking. “Rebecca Solnit put it much the same way…: ‘I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.’ In other words, thoughts – or souls – can get left behind if their hosts move too quickly.”
The body may be moving at three miles an hour, but for the mind to accept and embrace this slowness takes days, if not weeks, of continuous walking: “I was past the German border before my consciousness adapted to an ambulatory pace, and my thoughts began to move in rhythm with my footsteps. Then the idea of moving faster felt unnatural and vaguely alarming. … Solnit put it more succinctly: Walking ‘is how the body measures itself against the Earth.’”
“At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. One thing merges into the next: hills into mountains, rivers into valleys, suburbs into city centers; cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum. Traits and languages evolve, shading into one another and metamorphosing with every mile. Even borders are seldom borders, least of all ecologically. There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity.”
There is a lot I highlighted in Hunt’s lyrical piece. I related to his sense of displacement upon returning home, made particularly jarring by taking a plane back and traversing the same distance but at over a 100 times the speed of the walk. I distinctly remember having a similar out-of-body experience while sitting on a high-speed train gliding back home at 230 km/h after completing my walk across Germany. Hunt’s writing captures this feeling so elegantly:
“Flying had undone the walking, raveling it all back in. Much later I came to understand that, on a spiritual level, it had. I had not completed a walk, but half a pilgrimage. … The journey is not a straight line but a completed circle. The supposed destination – whether Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, the banks of the Ganges or anywhere else – is not the end of the road but the exact halfway point. The real destination is your own front door.” – Kai
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Shift How You Think About Time SPONSOR
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Celebrating its five-year anniversary and now in its ninth season, the podcast Time Sensitive features candid, revealing long-form interviews with curious and courageous people about their life and work through the lens of time, from the artist Edmund de Waal, to the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, to the architect Billie Tsien. Hosted by Spencer Bailey and produced by The Slowdown. Listen on timesensitive.fm, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
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Apps & Sites
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Baserow is a feature-rich, open source Airtable alternative for your database or application needs. You can either self-host or pay them to host it for you. Its free plan is more generous and its paid plans much cheaper than their Airtable equivalents.
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This is a great way to give people access to sensitive data if something happens to you: “Soon after you write your note, it will be encrypted and converted into a QR code which you can give to a person you trust. When this person tries to access your message, WeExpire will try to contact you via email as soon as possible; if you do not reply within the period of time you previously defined, your note will become visible to your trusted person.” By the way, this is a feature that’s included in Bitwarden – my password manager of choice.
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Taking a (big) page from Ecosia’s book, Karma is a Brave-powered search engine where a share of ad revenue goes to conservation initiatives that protect biodiversity and animal welfare. The performance and quality is still lacking, but I’m happy to promote alternatives to Google & Co.
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A wonderful ‘hobby project’ by Chris Woodford, a British science writer with over 25 years of experience in explaining science and technology: using easy-to-understand language, Chris explains hundreds of scientific concepts in concise form – from nuclear fusion to how planes fly.
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Worthy Five: Carlota Guedes
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A concept worth understanding:
As much as the non-binary movement disrupted the binary male/female, novogamy proposes a similar disruption of the binary monogamy/polyamory. Useful for anyone aiming to weave a romantic relational bond (or several) beyond what’s deemed socially acceptable, and at the service of the holistic needs of the lovers involved.
A book worth reading:
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, is a book to live by. A well of wisdom, inviting us to, among much more, expand our solitudes as a spiritual practice, and make space for melancholy as the foreign seed of the future already growing inside us.
A podcast worth listening to:
On Being by Krista Tippett offers more than two decades of conversation with some of the most thoughtful humans alive today. Krista’s ability to place her finger on and reveal the deeply personal, and therefore universal, wisdom lying in her guests’ core is pure delight.
A piece of advice worth passing on:
“Live the question.” – drawn from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (see above), this is what I remind myself and others when in moments of uncertainty, self-reinvention or transition. As opposed to rushing into answers, whether in the individual or collective realm, we’re invited to embody the question itself, which might be the closest we’ll ever get to uncovering the beginning of an honest answer.
A saying worth repeating:
‘Discipline is faith in action.’ When in need of a fair dose of grit, in whatever life’s domain, but particularly in the creativity terrain, I return to these words for both consolation and oxygenation.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Carlota Guedes in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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The dark side of clean energy & technology
There is a new resources race concealed behind the plans for a clean, tech-driven future. This new dependence on rare metals will become the centre of global tensions and trade wars, at least according to journalist, filmmaker and author Guillaume Pitron. “The Rare Metals War is a vital exposé of the ticking time-bomb that lies beneath our new technological order. It uncovers the reality of our lavish and ambitious environmental quest that involves risks as formidable as those it seeks to resolve.”
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Key concepts for choosing & using type
My long-time internet buddy Elliot Jay Stocks has a new book out in which he shares his deep typography knowledge with us laypeople: Universal Principles of Typography is a beautifully illustrated, comprehensive guide that will deepen your typographic proficiency and answer all your practical questions about working with type. Friends of DD ordering from North America enjoy a 30% discount + free shipping.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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Overheard on Twitter
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In honor of the eclipse, I will also get in the way of someone brighter than me.
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Food for Thought
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Travel writer Nick Hunt refelects on his 4,000km walk from Holland to Turkey and the personal and temporal distortions any long journeys on foot bring with it. His piece reaffirms my view (and that of many religions) that everybody should go on a long, difficult trek by foot at least once in their lifetime. “At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. One thing merges into the next: hills into mountains, rivers into valleys, suburbs into city centers; cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum. Traits and languages evolve, shading into one another and metamorphosing with every mile. Even borders are seldom borders, least of all ecologically. There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity.”
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Megan Garber argues that our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality, both on television and in our everyday lives. Unless an event is wrapped in a ‘dramedy’ storyline, most of us quickly lose interest. This contributes to a society struggling to make sense of the world. “We have gradually accommodated ourselves to the idea that if an event doesn’t become a limited series or a movie, it hasn’t happened. When news breaks, we shrug. We’ll wait for the miniseries. And take for granted that its version of the story will be true – except for the parts that are totally made up.”
(Paywalled – free archived view)
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Another fascinating read by Low Tech Magazine that will teach you a lot about the history of weapons. I love the closing argument, pointing out that, surprisingly, the weapons industry is one of the few fields where returning to ‘lower tech solutions’ would theoretically be possible. “The main reason most European armies switched from bows to crossbows and then firearms was the short learning curves of these weapons. Crossbowmen and musketeers required little or no training, while it took many years of practice to build an archer skillful and strong enough to be of use in warfare. The crossbow and the firearm thus expanded the number of people in a given population that could become soldiers. That was great news for those in power because they could now build large armies quickly.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Austrian photographer Rafael Steinlesberger specialises in nature macro photography, capturing colourful, texture-rich details of a world that’s hidden from the naked eye.
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If, like me, you’re into poster design, especially of the Swiss variety, you will love following SwissPosters on Instagram. (via)
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German artist André Schulze adds is own twist to artworks he collects from flea markets and antique stores. I quite like his pixelated series: ‘invading’ classic paintings with concepts from the digital world.
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Gigalypse is a chunky one-weight workhorse: “Gigalypse was conceived from a kind of superellipse known as a squircle; a square with no straight lines.”
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Notable Numbers
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The global wind industry installed a record 117 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity last year but needs to add triple this amount annually by the end of the decade to meet climate targets.
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The Government Pension Fund of Norway is an example of what’s possible when surplus revenues from fossil fuels are invested for the benefit of society instead of private investors. The pension fund is the world’s biggest with a value of around US$ 1.626 trillion. The fund made a mind-boggling $110 billion profit in the first quarter of this year alone.
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Rapid growth in global plastic production didn’t happen until the 1950s. Over the next 70 years, however, annual production of plastics has increased nearly 230-fold to 460 million tonnes in 2019. Even just in the last two decades, global plastic production has doubled.
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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