Head-down walking

   I know one thing about me--when I walk, I walk with my head down.
   I almost exclusively focus on the ground about three feet in front of me as I walk. This is not to say that I never get to enjoy the surroundings. I do occasionally look up to see where I am and what's around me but, for the most part, I walk quickly and I look down while I'm doing it.
   I feel I must appear quite strange and I try and remind myself to look up every once in awhile, so that people don't start to wonder.
   As an experiment once, I tried walking and only looking at things which were maybe fifty to a hundred yards ahead of me. I found this very disorienting. I became very uncertain as to what I was walking on and where I was stepping. At one point I actually became all weak and wobbly (but I suspect this might have been a coincidental sugar imbalance) and didn't really start to enjoy the walk until I went back to the head-down method.

   My brother and I use to frequent our neighbourhoods, employing the head-down walking style, if I remember correctly. I'm sure the neighbours made the odd there-go-them-weird-Baker boys comment. It only occurred to me just recently that I actually walk this way, otherwise it seems like a very normal way to walk.
   I walk partly for the exercise. As much as anything, though, walking gives me an opportunity for introspection. I believe that this is at least partially why I walk with my head down--it negates a lot of extraneous input from scenery, cars and other people that would otherwise cloud my ability to look inward.

   Some of my best thinking comes when walking. I have heard the theory that walking and running enhance the thinking process because they are activities which are not learned but are innate--you have been walking and running since you were born and never had to be taught how to do them. They are activities which increase the blood and oxygen flow to the brain without occupying it at the same time with details such as how to swing the golf club, how to hold the tennis racket, where to position yourself in hockey and so on. Without all this pre-occupation on learned things, the brain is free to wheel and deal, as it were. Getting a little bogged-down on things? Head on out for a walk!

   So I will continue to employ my head-down method. There is sometimes a world at your feet that you might miss otherwise. There is life and death down there. There is money. There are messages from strangers. There are things you really don't want to step in. There are signs, borders, edges, and dates. There is security and solidity.
   At the beginning of the long-running children's T.V. show, "The Friendly Giant", you are at ground level until you see the Giant's boot, at which point you are directed to "Look up, WAY up!" and this is when the adventure begins. To paraphrase this famous directive, I would suggest you go for a walk sometime, begin perhaps at eye level but then "Look down, WAY down!"