Frédéric Gros: why going for a walk is the best way to free your mind
Some of the finest thinkers in history were also enthusiastic walkers. In his surprise bestseller, Frédéric Gros uses philosophy to show how walking can bring about a sense of peace. So why is he so conflicted about life?
It is a sunny spring Sunday and – joy! – I am off to Paris to go for a walk. Not any old walk, but a walk with a man who really knows about walking: Frédéric Gros, a professor of walking. A philosopher of walking.
Strictly speaking, he’s actually a professor of philosophy who writes about walking, but this is nitpicking. What do I care? I love walking. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than walking uphill, for hours, in order to sleep under some flimsy piece of nylon fabric and then do it all again the next day.
This particular walk is not up a mountain, it’s in the Bois de Vincennes, Paris’s largest green space, but still. I am looking forward to a lungful of fresh air and the kind of insightful aperçus that possibly are available only to a Frenchman with a secure academic position and a command of one of the more expressive Latinate languages.
Walking is not sport, he says, in the first line of his book, A Philosophy of Walking. Sport is a discipline, “an ethic, a labour”. It is a performance. Walking, on the other hand, “is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found”. If you want to go faster, he says, don’t walk. Do something else: drive, slide, fly.