Walking and Talking

Last Saturday we went to a farmer’s market that is set up in a parking lot. It was busy and we had to park in another parking lot just up the hill. It had rained a bit, off and on that morning—much needed rain.

There is no sidewalk between the two lots, but over time people (possibly lazy) had trod a rather direct path down the hill to connect them. The path was clear but narrow: punctuated by rocks and stones of various sizes and bare dirt which had turned slippery from the rain.

None of this is unique or interesting, of course, except that it’s less frequent in the city. It was just unusual enough compared to my normal homebound routine for me to have to pay attention to where I put my feet and to notice that I was doing so.

We talked a bit as we picked our way along the path, remembering trips to the Boundary Waters, noting that somehow our feet, legs and pants were getting disproportionately wet and dirty, discussing lunch plans and how we were going to cook and freeze the sweet corn we just bought.

There’s a lot going on there—looking, stepping, talking, listening—all at once and all more or less automatically. It’s two of the things we humans seem to be built for and they’re extraordinarily complicated, requiring a great deal of effort from our brainparts. And yet walking and talking are so fundamental to human behavior—they are at once both completely mundane and borderline magical. It’s probably also not a coincidence that being able to do them simultaneously is quite practical.

The idea that our excursion down the hill (and back up) that day was “coordinated hunter-gatherer behavior” is laughable, but it had the right elements—the same shape. It’s uniquely human and we shouldn’t simply give it up. A nice set of cement steps and landings wouldn’t necessarily make it better. And maybe taking the long way through the parking lot, down the street and into the market isn’t better exercise: maybe sometimes the shortcut is.