How to walk off your smartphone addiction

Walking, the original mode of technological carriage, is also the original meditative, curative, and social technology. Every medical, psychological, and even religious outlook today fails if it doesn’t factor in the myriad dimensions and incredible gifts granted to us by this ambulatory form.

The overlooked, underappreciated act of walking involves multiple feats of engineering genius rivaling, or exceeding, our most advanced scientific comprehension. It is also the fastest, cheapest, most accessible means of ensuring collective well-being.

In terms Marshall McLuhan might accept, walking is man’s experience of the world without extension. It reverts human bodies back into orientation with themselves and the laws of nature. It’s a stunning thing if you wake up to it fully: our cities, routines, living and working spaces are not built to allow for the one physical operation we are inarguably built to perform day after day. The fundamentals of the economic machine are dependent upon our not walking, in fact. It isn’t just the phone or the internet. It’s the whole endeavor of global, just-in-time, dispersed industrial society.

Our minds and our senses of well-being and freedom are attached irrevocably to the operation of walking.

The few small towns in Europe that are built for walkers are usually also built around churches, and these lucky citizens routinely outlive their neighbors and report higher levels of happiness and well-being.

The central nervous system is wired to initiate unconscious anxiety when the body doesn’t move properly. If the body doesn’t move enough, it compensates by shortening muscles, which adds more anxiety, and limits strength. All of this shortens lifespans. The whole of our beings is indivisible from walking. It catalyzes digestion, moves lymph. And breathing, particularly while walking, pumps spinal fluid up into the brain — flushing, repairing, retiming.

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Photo by BSIP / Contributor via Getty Images

The theorist Paul Virilio remarked that the progression from carriage in the womb, to mother’s back, to horse, and then to car is characterized all through the chain by an increase in speed. Technological additions to the workplace and to our homes all revert back to speed. The trade-off is evidently human health, happiness, and increasingly it seems, sanity. Another famous theorist, Jean Baudrillard, had a great bit where he pilloried the American runner, the jogger burning his way across the empty landscape, ignorant of every other face, just speeding toward his own death.

How to walk

From a engineering perspective, the human body is not built to sit or lift heavy weight. We can do these things, no problem. The body, however, isn’t fundamentally designed or optimized for such things. It’s built to walk, fundamentally. Every system in the body supports this activity: endocrine, cardiovascular, psychic.

The Postural Restoration Institute has studied the mechanics, made some prescriptions, and while it’s rather simple stuff, it isn’t entirely intuitive, and it’s worth watching a few videos before you begin a practice of walking. A couple tips: heel to toe, every step. Eyes up to the horizon. The arms and legs work via complex arrangement of fascia built into slings. We use muscle to walk, sure. But to actually hit a stride, which is where we retime with ourselves independent of mechanical technology, requires reacquaintance with these slings. It’s easier than it may sound.

Walking is sort of the ultimate example of humans taking ourselves, our gifts, and the unity of our experience for granted. We used to walk all day, all the time. We walked for the mundane and the sacred — we called the latter pilgrimage, and while the destination (God) was important, every monk and layperson understood the actual walking aspect was sort of the point.

Last tip: Walking upright allows for perfect, proper engagement of the diaphragm. This flat muscle, in concert with the intercostals woven into the ribs, works as a bellows to pull air in, as you may realize. What isn’t so widely understood is that this muscular action is also what makes the exchange, renewal, of spinal fluid happen. You can force it when seated, but it’s subpar.

The kicker is that our minds and our senses of well-being and freedom are attached irrevocably to the operation of walking. Almost everyone has had the experience of taking a walk to solve a problem. Or just to clear our minds of trivia and the day’s tedium. We seem to have built an entire civilization, replete with advanced social and political devices, and overlooked an essential basic human need. How much longer are we willing to ignore the image, the actual purpose of the form of our construction, before that form demands we return?