Penguin, 2019

 ISBN: 978-0241357682

 Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain
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At the start of this book, the author tells us that once his elderly and formerly very active grandmother became unable to walk her health immediately began to decline. He then describes watching his baby daughter first discover – and very quickly perfect – the skill of upright locomotion. Placing one foot in front of the other, investigating and overcoming are intrinsic to our nature, he muses. Journeys of discovery are not something you start doing, but something you gradually stop doing. As he explains, it was on foot that the first humans began to spread around the globe. Walking on two legs laid the foundation for everything we have become today.

Walking is certainly the most foundational thing in this author’s life and during the course of that life he has accomplished things on foot that few people could even dream of, such as walking all the way to the South Pole, all the way to the North Pole and up to the summit of Mount Everest, all within six years.

Most of his walking, however, has been across shorter distances. Not only has it encompassed a vast variety of different settings, e.g. cities, towns, villages, countryside, mountains, valleys and forests, but each one of those settings has yielded its own particular experiences, encounters and insights, many dozens of which he describes in this fascinating, profound and all-round delightful book. Many of these yield memorable aphorisms:

Walking and silence belong together. 

To put one foot in front of another is one of the most important things we do. 

To walk…can be about loving the earth, seeing yourself and letting your body travel at the same speed as your soul. 

And, quoting something said by Hippocrates 2400 years ago, Walking is a man’s best medicine.

Many of Kagge’s walks are in natural settings, and he, like many others, recommends ‘forest bathing’ and also ‘earthing’ i.e. walking barefoot to reconnect oneself with the Earth. Anywhere we go, if we are able to walk in natural surroundings, it can help us to remember and to feel our oneness with the rest of Nature. At the same time, walking in the city gives us the opportunity to observe and enjoy the infinite variety of our fellow human beings. So every walk we take is a journey of discovery in some form or another.

We all need to make walking part of the fabric of our everyday lives. Kagge points out that, as I discovered myself, many years ago, walking twice a day between one’s home and one’s place of work is a wonderful way to transition slowly and gently between those two very different ‘worlds.’

Some of the walks he describes are deliberately different and unusual, such as a long trek around what in my opinion is the most pedestrian-unfriendly city in America – Los Angeles –where one is quite likely to be pulled up by a cop for doing something as weird as being on foot in a city of cars. And another trek, which I doubt anyone has ever attempted before – and with good reason since it is probably the smelliest and most unpleasant one imaginable – through the underground tunnels and sewers of New York City. Both of these experiences, like every walk he has ever taken, bring him new ideas, new understandings, new and valuable insights.

Kagge also speaks of his friendship with fellow Norwegian Arne Naess, the father of deep ecology. I was fascinated to learn that during the many years he spent living in his mountain cabin, Naess never took exactly the same path up to the cabin more than once – and wouldn’t let anyone else do so either. It was only after his death that a clear path was made visible. Also, he declared the seven feet of land surrounding the cabin as a Nature reserve and when he crossed it he only ever walked on the rocks.

I am glad I discovered this lovely little book. It is one well worth keeping and re-reading.