A Need to Walk (2014) | Hacker News Reader

A Need to Walk (2014)

craigmod.com

41 pointsTomte19 comments

I yearn to walk like I once did.

As a child I grew up in a corner of England much loved by walkers, in the shadow of Kinder, where ramblers first seized the right to walk on its sides.

As an adult I lived in a compact but vibrant city (Manchester), and each evening I would cross it and see new things.

In March of this year I walked from my then home near Hammersmith Bridge in London, down to Putney, the reverse of the first quarter or so of the infamous Cambridge/Oxford boat race course.

On getting home, I felt a little funny, went to bed, woke with a fever and over the course of two weeks slowly lost the ability to walk. Eventually, I was diagnosed with a spinal abscess which was causing some neuropathy. It was removed. I spent a month in rehab learning how to walk a little again, but left in a wheelchair.

I now have daily physio, I walk with a stick for 10-15 minutes max at a time. My goal is to be able to walk as I once did, and then further: into the Lake District, into the Cairngorms or Alps, perhaps - and I've played with this as a charity gig to raise money for the unit that helped teach me how to walk again - across Europe.

Yesterday I managed to walk the shore of the Thames near Twickenham and Richmond a little - a spot Alexander Pope called home, and was once considered a latter day "Arcadia". It was glorious, but hard work.

If you have the ability to walk, do it. If you must take an audiobook or headphones, fine. But I encourage walking and thinking and noticing and looking.

Then tomorrow, repeat the same path, and notice how everything is slightly different. Become connected to those differences.

Repeat the next day/night at the same time, and the next, and the next. After a while you will become connected to a tempo for your environment. It doesn't matter if you're in the middle of nature, at the heart of a throbbing city, or what was until now a banal suburban sprawl: change is everywhere, and through walking we become connected to it.

Nothing makes me want to learn how to walk again well, than my memories of walks past prompting the opportunity for future walks.

Go walk, you'll thank me for it one day.

Thanks for the reminder to appreciate the little things and not take anything for granted.

I wish you all the luck in your physical therapy.

Thanks for sharing. You're completely right; walking and seeing enriches life no end. As it happens I'm fortunate enough to live near the Alexander Pope spot you mention and regularly spend dawn walking around the bend of the River Thames from Twickenham to Richmond. Beautiful. I wish you a speedy recovery and much walking in your future.

I live near there too, on Richmond Road. I'm @p7r on twitter if you ever want to meet up and talk HN! :-)

This was beautifully written -- thank you.

>Yet the ability to safely walk alone, especially at night, is, for most cities, largely a luxury available only to men

AFAICT, this is more of a luxury available to folks with low trait neuroticism. It's like saying that motorcycle riding is a "largely a luxury available only to men". No, it's a luxury available to folks who are more willing to take risks with their personal safety. The gendered difference in risk exposure is much smaller than the one in how people respond to perceived risk (that is, women tend to have higher trait neuroticism).

I don't understand how your example is comparable. On one hand we have motorcycling, a mode of transportation that is fairly risky I suppose but is largely gender agnostic. On the other hand, walking alone at night in a city leaves you exposed to whoever might be around while you're walking. For men, the risk is mostly in getting mugged or maybe being struck by a car. For women, the risk is that plus the risk of being creeped on in a myriad of ways, ranging from uncomfortable, creepy comments down to full on sexual assault and rape. So no, the risks are not the same. And relating generally higher levels of neuroticism in women to a higher perceived risk seems more overtly sexist than scientifically sound to me.

Stranger rape is extremely rare though. Most reported rapes are by people the victim knows. You seem to be saying that walking at night is definitely hugely more dangerous for women than men, but that seems to be an assumption rather than something definite and concrete.

I sometimes walk at night. Many people view it as weird or slightly deviant behaviour. But where I live it's very safe. Their loss.

You should talk to more women. I've heard stories from women who have experienced very scary things while walking alone at night. Thankfully none of them actually ended in rape or assault, but they were dangerous situations that rightfully changed their perception of what is and is not safe for them to do alone at night. I've dated people who have had numerous sketchy interactions with men at night, sometimes involving men trying to lure them to a vehicle. It's disheartening and frustrating to hear, and possibly more disheartening that people don't see a problem because the rape numbers aren't high enough.

Men experience scary and sketchy things at night too. I've been walking with male friends in a well lit area when a car of yobs drove past yelling at us from the window. Bad start, but then an idiot in my group yelled back, the car pulled over, and the yobs started to attack us. Fortunately other people turned up before anyone got seriously hurt and they scarpered. I bet they wouldn't have attacked a group of girls - not gonna do much for your reputation as a tough guy if you pick on a group of women.

Your original point was that there's some sort of imbalance in how dangerous things are to walk around, and that it's categorically worse for women than men, but you didn't substantiate that. You just sort of assume it must be true.

But males are much, much more likely to be the victim of murder and robbery, and slightly more likely to be threatened verbally. There are stats on this, look at the "Sex differences in crime" wiki page.

"Talk to more women" is a worthless response by the way, I see this answer way too often when someone making an unsubstantiated argument about gender is asked to back it up or faced with contradictory data. It's like saying that data should be subservient to the random opinions of whoever happens to be nearby at the time.

If you don't think the risk is much higher for a woman to walk alone, especially at night, you are not paying attention.

There are several videos of women walking alone in city streets while being discreetly filmed by an assistant walking in front of them. The men who approach them range from bold to aggressive to creepy. It's not the majority of men they pass--but it is way more focused attention than I would get as a man walking down the street, and all of it is unwanted.

In one video, a guy starts silently walking next to the woman for three blocks. That's nerve-wracking behavior, and this is in broad daylight. Given low light and an otherwise empty street, some of those same men would have no qualms about using force. The danger that an unknown man presents to a woman is much greater than the danger that he presents to a man.

Whenever I'm very engaged in a conversation I like to walk back and forth. It always made my parents mad.

To this day, I can't sit if I'm on the phone. I walk around my apartment in circles the entire length of the call. Only now, my parents don't know I'm doing it.

I work from home and do the exact same thing. I carry my laptop around, too when I'm on a conf call or Webex. I've had to modify and improve my wifi network to handle ever last corner of my house.

What a silly thing to get mad about.

After I had left my job, and before I left Austin, I was trying to sell my condo there. The realtors would give a two or three hour window during which the condo might be shown, and I had to get the dog out of there. So I walked. I must have walked up and down every alleyway between Dean Keaton and 2222, Lamar and the interstate. I got to know the city better in a couple of weeks than I had in the years I'd lived there.

I hope that wasn't during the summer. That's a big rectangle!

It was May. I carried water!

I walk a lot, always have. But stuff like this, I prefer not to get bogged down in the "what does it all mean" of it. You can just walk because it's nice. No need to have a big philosophy or elaborate reasoning about it.

Minor comment, but isn't the whole trope of starting an article on "we need to do X more" with "famous person A did X, and famous person B did X" a bit played out?

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