This time, there’s no question of freeing yourself from artifice to taste simple joys. Instead there is the promise of meeting a freedom head-on as an outer limit of the self and of the human, an internal overflowing of a rebellious Nature that goes beyond you. Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us. What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake — for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait — a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life. Anonymous
About This Quote

The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life. The freedom of walking can be experienced as a process of opening and exposing oneself to the world. On the one hand, it is a process of becoming conscious of oneself and on the other hand, an awareness of self-consciousness. This means that on the path of walking, you will sometimes be aware that you are not who you think you are or who you think you want to be. You will become aware that your identity is not what it seems to be and that there is something else about you which is perhaps more important than your own self-image.

Source: A Philosophy Of Walking

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