The Shaping Force…

When talking to a friend recently about my While You Walk E-Course, he asked me, “But I obviously know how to walk, why would I want to take a course?”

Unless you’re experiencing a particular issue that prevents you from walking well, we tend to take walking for granted. However, walking well is not only important because it is a fundamental and defining movement of our species, but our particular way of walking is slowly shaping our body. Even though any exercise is generally good for our health, our walk can be both health promoting in the present and yet slowly wear away at our functionality over time. It’s easy to think of this as simply the consequence of aging, but that is a common misperception linking correlation with causation. Yes, we are aging in chronological time, but ideally, our gait and habits would promote healthy movement over our whole lifetime.

One metaphor I like to think of is of a river running down a hillside where it meets a large rock. The shape of the river is determined by that geographical feature as it finds its path of least resistance and flows around the rock. But over many years, the forces of the water begin to shape and carve out the rock as well. We are both the river and the rock. Our bodies tend to look for paths of least resistance and move around obstacles: for external habits, think taking the elevator instead of the stairs, and for inner tendencies, think how tight calf muscles may lead to turning out our feet to avoid moving directly through that ankle tension and thereby creating a whole new relationship with how your feet, knees, and hips interact with each other and the ground. Over time, those forces and relationships begin to carve out a different shape of the body that may not function quite as well as before.

This principle reminded me of a phrase that Barry Lopez uses in his essay “Literature of Place” where he talks about “geography as a shaping force.” The landscape and environment in which we live shape how we think about and relate to the world. They also shape our bodies by asserting forces that affect how we move through the world. Think of the differences between New York City and a farm for example (I’m hosting movement events in both places in October. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. 😊).

So, in answer to my friend’s question:
Walking is a process and relationship between all our body parts and our environment. Through better understanding and practice, we can determine whether that relationship is just a force wearing us down or a source of nourishment that helps us flourish.