The narrative structure of a walk lends itself to a good story. You start from a familiar place, somewhere to establish the characters, motivations, and conflict before the action starts. You leave this comfortable place and move out into the world, with a goal in mind (even if that goal is just to move, to experience the world around you, to get some exercise or some fresh air, to take out the trash). There are unknowns out in the world that you could not have accounted for before leaving. There are new people you will meet and people you will ignore and others that you might recognize. There are both familiar places and new locations that you must traverse, all the while taking in information and using that information to help you reach your destination (whatever that may be). You eventually meet your goal, after overcoming specific issues or conflicts that hindered your progress. You return to your comfortable place, or a new comfortable place is formed through the process of being on the walk (or journey, adventure, etc.). At the end, you recount what you learned, what you lost, what you gained, and how you changed. And most importantly, this walk-as-story framework scales. I could have just described The Lord of the Rings. Or it could have been a walk to get groceries.
You leave your comfortable house or apartment on a walk with the goal of buying food that will last you and your roommate for at least a couple of days. You know what route you will take to the store - you have taken it many times before. But you find out upon arrival that your regular grocery store has suddenly gone out of business. You now must now figure out the route to the next closest grocery store, and while you are looking at your phone in the mostly empty parking lot someone approaches you and asks if you know how to change a tire.
You do; the question makes you think of your dad carefully walking you through all the steps the day after you got your driver’s license. You help the stranded stranger change the tire, they offer you a few dollars as a sign of thanks, you attempt to refuse, and they insist. You take the money reluctantly and say goodbye to the stranger, whose name you forgot instantly. You start off for the next closest grocery store and find yourself walking through a part of town that you are almost completely unfamiliar with. Maybe you rode your bike down this particular street a few times growing up, or maybe this is where the detour led when the town was doing all that work to expand Main Street? You could find where you are on a map, but you don’t know who lives in these houses. You think you may recognize the person mowing their lawn across the street but you really can’t be sure. But, oddly, you do recognize a walking path through a dense patch of trees, and all of a sudden remember walking this path to a friend’s house many years before.
It leads through the woods right to the intersection where the next closest grocery store is located. You take the path, get to the grocery store 5 minutes earlier than Google Maps originally estimated, and go about shopping. This grocery store has a slightly different layout than your normal store, and so it takes a bit longer to find everything. Eventually you make it to the checkout and pay for all of your items. On your way out, you notice the scratch-off lottery ticket machine near the exit. You think of the few extra dollars in your pocket, and you end up spending about half of those dollars on some of the cheaper tickets. You throw them in your grocery bag and head home, back through wooded path, past the person now sitting on their porch admiring their freshly mown lawn, across the empty parking lot of the now-defunct grocery store, and finally through your own front door.
You put the groceries away before any of the frozen items get too melty, and after finding them at the bottom of a bag you leave the lottery tickets on the kitchen table. The whole trip took much longer than expected, so you sit down to think of what to do next. While you are resting, your roommate comes home from work and asks how your day was. You think back, and already seeing the plot points and funny coincidences lining up in your head, you start, “I took a walk to get groceries, and it ended up being a real adventure.”
And you will not be exaggerating. That walk was certainly an adventure. The stories we tell others about our day-to-day experiences almost always pertain to the surprising, unusual, exciting, or interesting things that happen to us. Everyone on some level understands that these happenings make for good stories. The story of an eventful walk is something we share with others because you can talk about, discuss, dissect, laugh at, wonder about, and return to everything that happened. That’s not to say every walk will be an adventure - not every story is good. Storytelling (to me) is much more about carefully choosing the story you want to tell than it is about creating an exciting story out of nothing. Walking helps practice the skill of noticing important plot points, picking out the exciting parts of daily life, and lends a structure to form these vignettes into something that captures an audience’s attention, even if that audience is just your roommate.
Links to Things I’ve Enjoyed Recently:
The MIT List Visual Art Center has been putting out walking prompts as part of their online summer programming. All of the prompts can be accessed as PDFs or audio recordings, and they are all very thought-provoking and reflective – great excuses to get outside and take a walk. I especially enjoyed David Horvitz’s entry.
If anyone has talked to me about social media or Instagram, they know I’m a sucker for conceptual, niche Instagram accounts. I recently came across @shoppinglistgallery, which works exactly as it sounds and is truly fascinating. Some other accounts in this vein are @crudeprunes, @lowresgoldengate, and @fruitinthesky.