I used to commute an hour each way to work, and my son’s many after-school activities often took me into the expansive flat landscape around Columbus, Ohio. Some days I logged well over a hundred miles in my car. Which means I filled my gas tank once a week, sometimes more. Which means I paid about seventy dollars per week. Which means I spent around $300 a month on gas. That was the cost for my car. My wife, Deedra, had hers too. We lived in a city where not much of anything was accessible by foot, and trains and buses were seldom available. There was no way to get around without driving. It felt like we spent more time in our cars than in our home. Our auto dependency had us hemorrhaging money.
Wouldn’t it be nice, my wife and I kept saying, not to worry about our cars? Wouldn’t it be nice to save for travel? Wouldn’t it be nice to walk wherever we wished?
For six weeks in the summer of 2006 I was ordained as a monk in Chiang Mai, Thailand—an obligation most Thai males fulfill for their family. There were many moments I found challenging, not the least of which was a centuries-old tradition called tak bat. Because monks are not allowed to keep, grow, or cook food, they depend on people to provide sustenance. Barefoot in our orange robes, we walked the city in the early morning, rain or shine, with an alms bowl: a kind of monk lunch box. This relationship is reciprocal. Devout Buddhists who gave us food accrued merit; we monks practiced humility.
We were to keep our eyes downcast. On my first day as a monk, mine remained on the black rim of my alms bowl, my arms hugging it tight like a teddy bear. I was supposed to feel the ground supporting the bottoms of my feet—this intimate connection between land and body—my steps neither too slow nor too fast. There was no talking save for the blessing we gave to people who put food into our bowls. Walking in this manner is a form of meditation, the rhythm of it like breathing: repetitive and necessary to stay alive. Monks in their eighties and nineties engage in it if they can.
I followed a few steps behind a senior monk, my teacher, my body dwarfing his. I was at my largest at that time: nearly four hundred pounds, painfully aware of my size on our walk, and painfully self-aware in general because most everyone in Thailand was considerably smaller than me.
When I first got to Thailand, I often woke early to put food in monks’ alms bowls and receive my daily blessing. It was a wonderful way to start the day. But on my first morning of being on the receiving end, I couldn’t give myself over to the experience. I couldn’t shed my lay self, who was filled with deep shame and a desire to disappear. There was nothing more visible than a four-hundred-pound monk, his orange robe like another sun greeting the morning gray.
In 2023, the winter before my family and I moved from Ohio to Exeter, England, my friend Jon joined me on a reconnaissance trip there. My son, Bodhi, had school, so Deedra stayed home with him.
The first day was filled with visits to primary schools Bodhi might attend. Deedra had set up the appointments on short notice, agreeing to whatever availability the schools had. She didn’t know the distances between the schools, didn’t know the landscape of Exeter. Neither Deedra nor I had ever been there, but when my job presented us with this opportunity, we agreed, excited at the prospect of living overseas, especially since we wouldn’t be bringing a car.
The first school was more than two miles from our hotel, up a hill that never ended. Every time Jon and I thought we were at the top, it turned out to be a trick of the eye, and there was more to traverse. It was 8:45 on a January morning, and sweat plastered my shirt to my back.
When we finally arrived, I was too tired to talk, too tired to think. I nodded and smiled while Jon asked all the questions: What after-school programs were offered, what were lunches like, what happened if a student needed extra help, what was the school’s disciplinary philosophy? He spoke so much, the headmaster assumed Bodhi was his son, and I was the tagalong friend.
Our next school tour was a three-mile hike away, this time downhill. The one after that was across the city again, up more hills. We zigzagged around Exeter twice more. My feet ached. My mouth was dry from my breathing through it. My lips were chapped and cracked. My legs had turned to bricks.
For the first few journeys between schools, I matched Jon stride for stride, but as the day wore on, I fell behind. Jon is skinny and tall, and he walks with a straight back and his chest sticking out. It’s a walk I’m familiar with: a walk of working-class pride, projecting confidence and a bit of intimidation. Even though both of us hailed from similar urban environments, my walk was different. Especially since the pandemic, my body curved in on itself. Returning to our hotel at the end of the day, I watched Jon’s back as we traversed the last hill and felt encouraged to see that he was struggling himself. Gone was that straight-back walk, that extended chest. Still, he was far ahead, with a cigarette between his fingers, no less.
According to our watches—because watches are no longer for telling time—we’d logged more than thirty thousand steps and climbed the equivalent of fifty-five floors. At the hotel bar Jon said, “You sure about not having a car here?”
In the late nineties journalist Bill Bryson wrote about returning to America after living most of his adult life in England. The essays were serialized in Britain’s The Mail on Sunday and later gathered in a book titled I’m a Stranger Here Myself. I reread it prior to moving to England, wanting to understand how life there differed from American life—from what foods are found at grocery stores to what tax forms you need to fill out. I also wanted to get an idea of what the English thought of us Americans.
In one essay, Bryson observed Americans’ aversion to walking. The statistics he put forth were dated, but the essay still rang true. It did not feel absurd, for example, when Bryson wrote that his American neighbors—his neighbors!—drove to the Brysons’ house for dinner. It was not absurd because I had seen this happen. In fact, I had done this myself. I was also the type of person who would park at Best Buy and then drive sixty feet to park in front of PetSmart.
I was a sedentary creature, but at least I was not alone. The entire nation was sedentary. Citing a University of California at Berkeley study, Bryson wrote that the average American walked “less than 75 miles a year—about 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.”
America isn’t an easy place to walk. In 2022 there were 7,522 pedestrian-related deaths—the highest in forty-one years. Who in their right mind would dare to walk here?
Walking barefoot as a monk was a constant reminder of how we humans are always connected to the earth, bound by gravity, ever aware of the heft we carry—some of us more than others. It made me feel the mechanics of movement: muscles and tendons stretching and contracting, propelling the leg forward. It made me aware of the ground we walked on, the dirt and tar and tufts of grass in cracks, the unevenness of the pavement, the changes in terrain. This was spiritual walking, a bringing of awareness to our breath and our steps.
It sucked.
On that first alms walk, my feet bled—between my toes, along my instep. My heels stung from stepping on sharp pebbles. My soles formed dirty blisters because I tended to drag my feet. The awareness I was bringing to my movements made me unsure of my steps. I wavered back and forth. I silently cursed myself and the street and the whole morning ritual. I sweated waterfalls of sweat. My orange robes grew soaked, turned a darker shade. Perspiration dripped from my nose into my alms bowl. (A little extra salt, I would joke later.)
Because I followed him, I noticed the measured, meditative way my teacher moved: Heel, ball, toes. Heel, ball, toes. His steps confident. His entire self at peace, body and robes swaying as one. His back was straight, his head down in humility. He walked as a natural way of existing. No thought necessary.
I, on the other hand, walked with too much thought. Am I doing it right? Are people watching? What are they thinking of me? Am I funny looking?
Once, my teacher stepped on a piece of glass and seemed not to notice. His stride never changed. Behind him, I could see the glass embedded in his heel, like a clear gem encased in rock. I wanted to say something, but I wasn’t supposed to talk. I winced with each of his steps. I curled my toes. I felt as if the piece of glass were in my own heel. I kept my eyes trained on it. It remained there for a mile before falling out, leaving a red indentation.
What I noticed immediately in Exeter was that most everyone walked, and most everyone went about their business of walking without minding the business of other walkers.
England is designed for foot travel. Sidewalks are plentiful, as are pedestrian crossings, which cars stop at (mostly). In 1778 an English priest by the name of Thomas West wrote about walking as a way to be in observance of the world and its natural wonders. The Romantic poets took this to heart. What was there for Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats to write about if not their long sojourns in the Lake District? Half of English poetry, in fact, would vanish if not for walking.
In Ohio Deedra and I drove Bodhi three blocks to school. Now we walked, and his school was more than a mile away—a mile that involved large hills and, on many days, rain and strong gusts of wind because it was England. We left at the same time every morning and every afternoon. Our walks to and from school amounted to four miles a day—and on top of that were the chores and errands that had us hiking all over town. Because we’re ultracompetitive, we used our watches to see whose weekly step total was higher. Winner got bragging rights. Every night we made sure our watches were charged. Nothing’s worse than having it run out of battery while your gloating spouse adds to their number of steps throughout the day.
Bodhi and I started playing a game on the way to school: We looked for a substantial piece of litter—an energy drink can, say, lodged in a dead bush. We didn’t pick the can up, but every day after that we noted whether it was still there. If it remained at the end of the week, we’d throw it in the “rubbish bin,” as Bodhi had started calling it. Litter was everywhere. The environmental destruction we humans have enacted on this earth is obvious, but I didn’t take it in, I didn’t feel it, until I started walking.
Once, on the bottom of the last hill that curled toward the school, someone had spilled a container of rice on the sidewalk. As a Thai man and an avid lover of rice, I regarded this as a tragedy. Day after day the rice remained. We watched it decay and change color from white to yellow to brown to green to black. The peculiar thing was that it was smack-dab in the middle of the sidewalk, scattered four feet in each direction, but the grains of rice were never disturbed. Many people walked that route, and everyone circumnavigated it. It remained there for weeks until a thunderstorm washed it away.
The rice had become a marker of our morning walks in the early months of living in Exeter. As gross as it became, it was a comforting gross, like a father’s belch or a son passing gas and laughing.
Stateside, walking had been a special-occasion activity, like when we’d drive to one of the many metro parks in Columbus and hike a trail. It was also my least-favorite family outing. I preferred movie theaters, bowling alleys, tennis courts, driving ranges, batting cages—anything but walking.
To love walking is to love the body, and this has been a barrier for me. Walking requires us to be a physical presence moving in a physical space. Your body is on display, with all its jostling parts and creaky joints. I know it’s vanity—this self-consciousness, this awareness of other people’s eyes—but it was something I shouldered when I walked, something that made me seek the comfort of a climate-controlled car.
Bodhi and I sometimes play a macabre game in which I ask him about the most dangerous things on earth. It’s not exactly the healthiest game to play with a seven-year-old, but, like my mother, I parent by fear (a habit I’m trying to undo).
When we’re in a car, driving somewhere, I’ll ask, “What has oofed the most people in the world?” I use the word oof rather than kill because it’s something his favorite YouTubers do.
“Mosquitoes,” Bodhi sings.
“What else?”
“Guns.”
“What else?”
“Cars.”
“And we have a winner.” I clap, taking my hands off the wheel for a brief second. He claps too. The car is filled with applause for death.
After my first alms walk, my teacher asked me how I felt.
“Good,” I said.
“Was it too long?”
“No.”
“Do your feet hurt?”
“A little.”
“Bleeding?”
“A little.”
He smiled, his face doughy. “You are part of the land now,” he said, “in spirit and in body.”
After two weeks I came to look forward to taking the same path, seeing the same people. I was coming to understand devotion and repetition and humility. When a monk walks, his eyes should not look too far ahead, but neither should they be at his feet. They should be ten yards in front of him. And a monk’s ears should listen to the land waking up—the creaks and groans of the earth. The land is alive. It communicates. This earth, this world, is more than shape and matter.
“What is land,” my teacher said, “other than a place that houses the body? Even a big body like yours. The land doesn’t care what anyone looks like. It only cares that you are here.”
He was right. I knew he was.
The last thing I remember about that first alms walk was the shower after. The water felt good. As I let it run off my bald head, my eyes took in the explosion of dirt that bloomed from my feet when water hit them. They were so dirty, so black. Mixed with that dirt was a swirl of red.
The way we walk, our precise gait, is unique to each of us, like a fingerprint. When I was younger, I obsessed over how I looked when I walked. I wanted to possess a “manly” walk, so I observed and cataloged different types: the dancer’s walk, where a person sashays on the tips of their toes; the ice-skater’s walk, where a person doesn’t step but glides; or the ground shaker, where each step rattles pictures on walls. I was a mimic walker. Any walk I found interesting, I copied.
My father always said the way you walk is an indicator of the person you are. He was barely five feet six inches tall, yet he possessed the bluster of someone much larger, someone not afraid to gloat or brag or tell you a story about how wonderful his son was.
For most of my life I’ve been a shuffler, my feet barely lifting off the ground. My walk is slow-paced, sluggish, and often punctuated by heavy sighs. Before Deedra and I dated, she commented on how she would hear me coming and know it was me by the sound of my steps. This made me giddy; it meant she was listening for me. But really my walk was an indication of how disconnected I felt—how, at times, I didn’t want to exist.
During the pandemic my walk changed even more. In a world of distrust, in a culture that pitted us against one another, with violence always on the news, I walked hunched over, so much so I developed a sore neck. A hump formed at the top of my back. I didn’t want to look at anyone, didn’t want anyone to look at me, so I dug my hands deep into my pockets and curled into myself.
One afternoon in Exeter, walking to pick up Bodhi from school, I noticed how hunched I had become. It had been four months since our move, which meant I’d made that walk more than three hundred times by then, but only on this day did I notice a gargoyle staring down at me from above.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to look up at it. Such an odd sensation to straighten and tilt my head back. It was a rare sunny day in Exeter. I shielded my eyes with my hand and felt like a flower willing itself through the ground. Then I waved at the gargoyle. I don’t know why. Cars whizzed by. People walked on both sides of the street—parents like me, getting their kids from school. The steeple of St. Leonard’s Church was in the distance, a beautiful marker of how far it was to Bodhi’s school. I headed toward it, my head high, learning a new way of being.
