Up@dawn 2.0

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Walking And More Walking


In the spirit of Angel and Dr. Oliver, how can we forget Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are Made For Walking. It's not exactly Rihanna or Nicki Minaj but pretty risqué for 1966.


I love to keep the collective highlighter feature on in Kindle. This passage was the most highlighted in Chapter 5 entitled Slowness

There seems to be a not-so-undercurrent zeitgeist of simplicity pounding at the door of progress, sprawling across the country's once-foliaged landscape in a startling spectacle of concrete and steel. 

"But haste and speed accelerate time, which passes more quickly, and two hours of hurry shorten a day. Every minute is torn apart by being segmented, stuffed to bursting. You can pile a mountain of things into an hour. Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints...The eye is quick, active, it thinks it has understood everything, grasped it all. When you are walking, nothing really moves: it is rather that presence is slowly established in the body." (pp. 37-38). 

People seem to fantasize or at least romanticize slowing down. I say, in a pluralistic fashion, that we embrace both. Why not utilize the gigabit speed of the modern internet as well as other technologies to give ourselves that "extra" time to slow down, take a walk, and take in the newly-laid concrete and steel. 

More to come, but I have an idea: a philosophy pub walk. I think the Green Dragon in Murfreesboro offers happy hour prices to anyone who walks to the pub. I'm not sure of the distance requirements, but it's a thought. 

DQ:  Do you feel like we should slow down, as a society, or does the hustle and bustle equal productiveness? 





4 comments:

  1. I'm up for a pub walk to the Green Dragon! Starting at the courthouse on the square, say, it should take us all of about five minutes to get there.

    I agree, we have to pick our spots for slowing and speeding. But is there a more ridiculous concept in the universe than "race-walking"?

    Nancy Sinatra! One of my first LP purchases, along with Chubby Checker's "Peppermint Twist."

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  2. Walk a Mile in My Shoes (Joe South)... I'm Gonna Be (I would walk 500 miles...The Proclaimers)...Walkin' on the Sun (Smash Mouth)... Walking on Sunshine (Katrina and the Waves)... Walk This Way (Aerosmith, Run-DMC)...Walk Like A Man (Four Seasons)... Walk Like An Egyptian (Bangles)...The Long and Winding Road (Beatles)

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  3. I must say I enjoyed this Nancy's music video lol! I also agree, life is all about balance. Knowing when to speed up as well as when to slow down. Doing too much of either can hurt one's journey in life.

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  4. I would be interested in doing that as well! I definitely think that some hustle and ambition is necessary to make america run the way that it does. Business is a race, favoring the quickest and more active. However, in that mindset one loses the beauty of diligence, and slow, deliberate thought out moevements. Some instances are games of checkers and others games of chess.

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