Daily Practice

My daily practice: Walking https://youtu.be/wAV2lLWSOXk

I walk pretty much everywhere. Even when going somewhere in a car or on a bus, I walk to get to the vehicle, walk on, and walk out. Walking helps keep me active, and having to walk to get to places I want can turn exercise into something not so tedious, even into something fun!

I started documenting my walking on September 2, 2019 (about a week ago) and hadn’t realized how much I actually walked. I also realized that I only really wear one pair of shoes (my vans), but that’s okay because they are comfortable and durable and I really like them 🙂

My daily practice ties into my art practice in the sense that they both happen daily, and they both challenge my curiosity and creative outlook. I never thought I would be doing something creative with walking, a simple task that I rarely even think about. Art making is something I use more purposefully to do the same thing: challenge myself and look at things differently. Walking gets me to different physical places, art gets me to different creative and visual places.

My daily practice also affects my environment and community. Walking is not only better for the earth than driving a car or what not, but it also changes it. In my video (at 3min16sec), I walked down a set of stairs. I noticed that they were worn away and warped at certain spots from people walking up and down over the years. Me walking up and down the stairs is adding to the erosion of the steps, I wonder what else I was affecting and wearing away, even without seeing immediate effects. I noticed myself walking different ways to get to the same places – some days I’d walk through the grass if I needed to get somewhere faster (aka I woke up later and needed to be to classes on time). This is similar to art in the sense of making or creating faster to meet tight deadlines as opposed to working leisurely on something that I enjoy more or isn’t my top priority.

I wanted to look for ways to make walking places fun, which was hard because it’s such a simple activity. I decided to just roll with the simplicity and see where it took me. I enjoy walking and could probably get lost easily if I was just focusing on the ground and different textures on my route instead of focusing on where I needed to be and what was on the way there. It’s weird how I didn’t ever really think about walking, something I do literally every day, something so prominent in my life. It’s interesting how something so big is so easy to ignore when it feels like nothing.