I am traveling. So we’re dipping into the Our Land archive and rerunning a piece from a year ago that drew a lot of positive reaction. It starts with an observation about a news cycle that seems to have shifted into “hyperdrive of extremism.” Alas, the same could be said of the present moment. I hope the advice I provide here can be of use to readers…
In recent days, it has certainly felt as if the wheels were coming off. Republicans have shifted into a hyperdrive of extremism, passing more restrictions on reproductive rights in an accelerating assault on women’s freedom. They have intensified their war on commonsense gun safety measures, even as tragic mass shootings keep occurring. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, the wannabe autocrat, signed a bill allowing residents to carry concealed weapons without a permit—days after the massacre at the Covenant School in Nashville killed three children and three adults—and legislation that would impose a six-week abortion ban. In Tennessee, GOP state legislators abused their power and booted two Black representatives out of office. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott urged a pardon of a man convicted of killing a Black Lives Matter protester. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene defended the suspected Pentagon leaker because he is “white, male, Christian, and antiwar.” An activist Trump-appointed federal judge issued an anti-science ruling straight out of Gilead. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his right-wing activist wife, Ginni, were snared in not one but multiple financial scandals further undermining the legitimacy of the highest court. At the NRA’s annual convention, which was graced by the appearances of most top Republicans, children as young as 6 years old were groomed to be gun fetishists.
Meanwhile, Trump, of course, has been Trump—in addition to all his usual demagoguery, inanity, and fear-mongering, he reposted on his own social media site a post that apparently included a simulated video of the brutal execution of billionaire George Soros, the No. 1 political target of the paranoid right. More important than this foul deed from a foul man, no top Republican denounced his appalling act. The most popular Republican presidential contender was unabashedly boosting his preexisting support for political violence, and the GOP shrugged.
It seems that the far-right whirlwind of hate has quickened, with each news cycle dominated by more outrageous acts and attacks on decency and democracy. The stressors on our political system appear to be growing—almost beyond our capacity to process all of it. So, I’m going to write about...walking.
At the start of this year, I had a surgery. It went well; I’m fine. But part of the recovery process entailed no exercise or major physical activity for six weeks. I have tried to stick to a daily regimen that includes 20 to 30 minutes on an elliptical machine. That was out. What can I do? I asked the doctor. Walk, he said.
That’s what I did. On most days, I would take long walks that lasted one and a half to two hours. What I expected to be an annoyance turned out to be a sublime experience.
I’ve never minded walking. I’ve always enjoyed a moderately strenuous outdoors hike. (Nature!) I walk my dog, Moxie, at least twice each day. Since steps became a thing, I’ve been conscious of getting my steps each day. (Okay, on some days.) But this was different. These long walks had no destinations. They had no purpose—other than the mere act of putting one foot in front of the other. I simply ambled, choosing paths and directions with no clear objective. I didn’t look at my phone—except to determine when it was time to head home.
Without a designated endpoint, I began to pay close attention to whatever I passed. I was not hurrying by; I was curious. There was nothing momentous to view—just hills, street corners, trees, houses, schools, strangers, and neighborhoods that I had never paid much notice. Now all of this registered. I focused on everything, everywhere, one impression at a time. One day, as I was striding alongside a busy road during an evening rush hour, I was struck by a thought: You can probably find a dash of beauty in almost everything.
Yes, I know that sounds hippy-dippy, not like a tough-minded reporter. But as an occasional practitioner of meditation, I realized the walks were putting me in a deeply contemplative frame of mind—I might even call it a meditative state. (I recently was a guest on the podcast of Robert Wright, the author of Why Buddhism Is True, and we discussed meditation for the portion of the show only available to subscribers.) I had previously heard that some people deeply into meditation engage in a practice they call walking mediation. Perhaps I had stumbled on to that. There was a calming and otherworldly element to these treks. (And, more than once, I did think of the Talking Heads’ song “And She Was,” which supposedly is about a woman having an out-of-body acid trip and soaring above her neighborhood.) The more miles I covered, the more hours I walked, the more I found that all the psychobabble buttons were actually being pushed: I felt destressed, centered, and connected.
Eventually, the six weeks ended. I could return to my elliptical machine and did so. Work and life got busy, and it seemed impossible to find the 90 or so minutes I had dedicated to these walks. After all, 20 time-efficient minutes of interval training on the machine did the aerobic trick. On shorter walks, I attempted to recapture those sensations of the extended rambles—but only with a limited degree of success.
The other day I came to a deeper understanding of the neuroscience underlying what was happening during these long walks. I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Shankar Vedantam’s Hidden Brain, which airs on many NPR stations. His guest for this episode was Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies what he calls “pro-social emotions.” He is author of the new book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. The big idea explored during this episode was the link between emotional wellbeing and awe. One example Keltner pointed to in his own life was being in a mosh pit at an Iggy Pop show when Iggy leapt into the crowd. Keltner was one of the fans who held the wild punk rocker aloft as Iggy crowd-surfed. His connection with Iggy—the ecstasy—made him feel stronger and more alive. (Longtime readers of Our Land might recall I had a very different experience with Iggy Pop in similar circumstances.)
Awe, Keltner explained, can provide an emotional or psychological reset that “connects the individual to collectives. And time and time again when people experience awe, they say things like ‘I felt small, and I felt like I was part of something larger than myself.’ And this is fundamental to our survival… Awe helps us see the systems around us and understand them.” It’s math: “The self takes up a lot of area in the brain and our consciousness. We're always thinking, especially in this modern world about my goals, my status, my aspirations, what I'm doing, it's my desires, my interests. And evolutionists have really talked about the problem of self-interest. How do we get people to orient to other people, to societies and collectives? And we started to have this idea that awe does that by creating the small self.” Keltner cited a study that found that brief experiences of awe activated the vagus nerve, which slows the heart rate, deepens breathing, and regulates digestion. Another one discovered that our inflammatory responses are somehow calmed by awe.
Keltner’s prescription for feeling better about oneself and the world was simple: doses of awe. But these days that may be tough, especially for young people. He told Vedantam that the students he teaches are “deprived [of awe] because of the new technologies, which frankly just get us too focused on the self. The more we're focused on the self, the narrow parts of the self, the less awe we feel.” He did offer a practical suggestion: Take an “awe walk”:
One of the easiest ways to find awe is to, in an unbounded way, go out and walk. We have been doing this as humans for a long time. In the spiritual contemplative traditions, getting out into nature and doing all walks is just part of those traditions...And you not only go out to do it vigorously and to help your heart, but you go with a childlike sense of wonder and you just stop and reflect on what is really interesting and the small things around you, the flowers and patterns of shadows. And also, look up past the horizon and look up to vast things. And do it in a way where you go places that you're curious about.
When I heard this, I was awe-struck. That’s exactly what I had done unintentionally (though with some intention). Keltner reported that in his studies of people who had engaged in awe walks, he found this exercise did succeed in generating awe for the participants. Second, in drawings they made after these walks, his subjects depicted themselves as smaller figures. (“The self [in the drawings] gets smaller over time and it starts to drift off to the side and they're including the rocks and sunsets of their awe walk.”) And, finally, their anxiety and stress levels dropped. I did not sketch drawings of my walks. But I can report that I was able to produce awe out of the ordinary and that I did feel a calm during and after the walks.
On the podcast, Keltner and Vedantam talked about the social value of awe—how this sensation can cause people to put aside self-interest and be more attuned to the community and to collective needs. Given our fractured society—which feels as if it is fracturing at warp speed these days—we certainly can use more awe. But I don’t know if we’re going to be able to persuade NRA leaders, the Tennessee legislature’s speaker of the House, or Trump to take awe walks. But I highly recommend it for anyone trying to cope with the political craziness of the moment.
