Thomas J Bevan complains that people no longer stroll. The need to keep abreast of phones, pump audio into their ears, and count steps, he says, makes people “pollute their potentially edifying walks”. In sum, for Bevan walking is not an activity, not something to be doing, it is simply being.

That leads into an interesting discussion of an idea from Bob Black that “free time” is something people have been coerced into doing by Capital.

“Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don’t do that. Lathes and typewriters don’t do that.”

That makes sense, and I had not thought of it in this way before. It also makes a mockery of all those businesses that seem so keen on work-life balance; their goal, I suspect, is to offer just enough life to extract a maximal amount of work. What concerns me, though, is that Bevan wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He sort of admits as much.

“It may seem that I am getting worked up about a series of trivialities here.”

Indeed, it does, because he seems to propose that there is only the one correct way to walk, the aimless saunter that takes in chance discoveries, investigates little by-ways and offers the space to surface creative thoughts. I love that kind of walk. I also love pounding round the park, filling my head with podcasts which, as it happens, also trigger creative thoughts, and accumulating steps that do contribute to my own maintenance and repair.

We can, and should, walk to be and walk to do.