The art of walking: How this everyday act can bring you inner peace | Erling Kagge | Big Think
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- Опубліковано 19 бер 2020
- The art of walking: How this everyday act can bring you inner peace
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"[T]oday, most people are sitting on their arses in a chair looking at the screen to discover and explore the world," says Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge. ""And that's a huge misunderstanding. You're missing out on some of the greatest things in life."
There is an inner silence to be found through walking, says Kagge. You exercise your curiosity and the movement of your body, which are two ancient and important things for Homo sapiens.
Some people experience silence through meditation, mindfulness, or yoga. But Kagge emphasizes that you don't need any formal techniques. If you are interested in finding inner silence, you can create it anywhere, just by walking.
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ERLING KAGGE:
Explorer, art collector, publisher, and author, Erling Kagge is the first person to have completed the Three Poles Challenge on foot--the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest. He has written six books on exploration, philosophy, and art collecting, and runs Kagge Forlag, a publishing company based in Oslo, where he lives.
Check Erling Kagge's latest book Walking: One Step At a Time at amzn.to/2wiD0GJ
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TRANSCRIPT:
ERLING KAGGE: I think the world has partly turned insane in the sense that we spend, like, three or four hours every day just looking down on a screen. And the whole idea that you can explore the world, get to know people, respect the environment, to love the earth just by sitting and watching a screen is problematic. It's wrong, and it's also one of the reasons why people feel so unhappy today. They claim to be very sad. They claim to be lonely and depressed. I think this partly, to a great degree, comes down to us just looking down and not looking up around us and up towards the sky, because that's what makes life worth living.
I think we're all born explorers. When I look at kids, they would like to climb before they can walk. Eventually, when they learn how to walk before they can talk, they walk over to the sitting room, across the floor, out through the door, and wondering what's hidden behind the horizon. And this humans have been doing for 200,000 years. It was not Homo sapiens who invented walking on two legs. It was a possibility, walking on two legs; we invented Homo sapiens. So we have always been discovering the world in a truly physical way. And that's one of the reasons why walking is so important. Because today, most people are sitting on their arses in a chair looking at the screen to discover and explore the world. And that's a huge misunderstanding. You're missing out on some of the greatest things in life.
I'm very curious. Curiosity is a driving force for me. And when I walk-like I walked to the studio here in New York-I try to watch people, do people watching. And of course, their faces pass so quickly in the street. So it's kind of hard to tell what people are thinking and what's going on in their mind. I have a longer time to see how they walk. And quite often, you can actually see how they feel by the way they're walking. You can even sometimes feel what kind of professions they have when you look at them walking.
For instance, like police officers and officers in the army, they walk totally different from other people. A priest also walks, has a different gait. While you can see the homeless people in New York and the beggars, they walk totally different. So somehow, what they're doing is inscribed in their bodies and inscribed in the way they're walking. Like a homeless guy, he walks absolutely the opposite way than an officer in the army. He walks bit like this. His knees are sagging down a bit like this. So, you know, the way you walk can actually tell you a lot.
To me, as a Norwegian, the best way to experience silence is to just walk in one direction out of the city where I'm living and to let it get really quiet around me, and stay there for a few days and nights and experience silence. But obviously, if you live in New York, that's not so simple. So I think you can actually find silence absolutely everywhere, in the sense that you need to invent your own silence. You can't wait for silence to come to you. You have to start to explore this inner silence-the silence which is inside you at all times and waiting for you. Just try to discover what's going on in your mind and in your body. You can do meditation to do it. You can do yoga. You can do mindfulness. But to me, you actually don't need any techniques. I think you can...
Read the full transcript at bigthink.com/videos/benefits-...
![The Power of Walking and Silence - [English]: John Francis at TEDxTokyo](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/R4PMfoAK2Ek/mqdefault.jpg)
Hello, Big Thinkers! With the COVID-19 outbreak, not everyone can go out for a walk, so we are curious to know: what activities have you come up with to help bring you inner peace?
My Dr prescribed walking for my depression... yeah, right?
I left feeling angry, patronised, my condition belittled and my time having been wasted.
In order to prove this idiot wrong I began walking 10 miles every day, within a few weeks my mood was substantially improved, a few months in I was well enough able to work again (I took a job with a lot of walking). Walking is therapy, meditation and my exercise, it allows my brain the time and space to process things I'm blocking by procrastinating, gaming or using chemicals like alcohol or opiates to alter my mood. Instead of going in to call him [my GP] out, I ended up going in to thank him.
Do you listen music while walking?Because for me it feels like music takes the peace away.
I'm curious to know what job you took that involves a lot of walking. :)
Great time to post a video about going for a walk. right after I've been banned from going outside, with the threat of imprisonment. 🤣
I guess that suggesting a treadmill and some VR goggles would be missing the point of this video. :D
I just started to read Erling's book Silence in The Age of Noise, very poetic and beautiful.
the art of walking in very small circles aka the art of self quarantine :P
Walking is the best medicine!
Walking is my religion
Thank You! ✨😃
Your so right!!!
I was suggested to try mindfulness especially mindful eating. I reported that I was mindful smoking they almost had stroke from the shock but she couldn't argue against my alternate approach to mindfulness....lol
Modify techniques so they work for you.
0:16 and the light goes ERRRR, you lose, only when you have money.
walk good places while u can
Yoga with the wife. Taking the dogs for a walk around the neighborhood. Meditation.
I found this information from looking down at a screen..
All ok if walking doesn't cause intense pain. Wish I could.
👋 Norman Peale famously said change your thoughts and you change your world. A money maker @evenkingsfall (his insta) says the key is you have to THINK BIG to WIN BIG! Always keep that energy! Keep up with the great videos 💥
I hate walking. It's just so slow and inefficient. I'm a cyclist.
gait
How do you tell if someone has had a stroke?
You ask them.
…and they’d be JUST FINE if they’d only use that mystical bobgland in their foot, the one that’d TELL ’em what to do if they’d only THINK with it! When Man stands on his brain and thinks with his feet, THEN HE’LL KNOW EXACTLY WHICH WAY TO GO and how to FIND "BOB." You gotta MASSAGE that foot gland…and the only way to massage it is to WALK ON IT! Because when you’re walkin’… and "Bob"’s talkin’… you’ll know what to do, after the Holocast, after the Aliens come and give us all those GIANT PILLS, and all them machines that’ll run our lives and that BIG WHITE STONE that everybody’s gonna know PERSONALLY in their very own living rooms. That’s the stone that you think you might know and you think might HELP YOU, but BY GOBBS, that’s the Stone that’s gonna ruin your VERY LIFE! You think you know who Big Brother is? HAHAHA. Dear friends, I wanna tell you tonight, YOU DON’T KNOW! YOU DON’T KNOW NOTHINT’!
Drinking water every day is good for you, what? I thought we were Listing all the things are good for you
3-4 hrs are rookie numbers
Walking through coronavirus?