Walking with too many people (and the wrong kind of people) can prevent one from experiencing the many benefits of walking in one’s thought processes (walking changes your perspective). Too many people leads in people being alienated from one another as they form smaller groups. The wrong kinds of people will not allow for solitude to happen.

For a walk to be nurturing, you have to find your own pace—a pace you can sustain for long hours. Solitude is necessary here, so you can truly hear yourself, and what it needs. But one can be alone together, that is, to share solitude, as long as those who one shares solitude with knows how to hold that space.

We can make the argument though, that whenever one walks, one is never truly physically alone. There are two reasons for this

• In the environment where one walks, living things and the terrain present external stimuli, sometimes even distracting.
• Walks, especially long ones, lead to an awareness of dialogue between mind and body. This conversation leads to thoughts born from movement (see words written outdoors vs indoors), which triggers contemplation.

References

Gros, F. (2014). A Philosophy of Walking. Verso.

Being in company forces one to jostle, hamper, walk at the wrong speed for others. When walking it’s essential to find your own basic rhythm, and maintain it. The right basic rhythm is the one that suits you, so well that you don’t tire and can keep it up for ten hours. But it is highly specific and exact. So that when you are forced to adjust to someone else’s pace, to walk faster or slower than usual, the body follows badly.

So with up to three or four people, walking allows these moments of shared solitude. For solitude too can be shared, like bread and daylight.

To be buried in Nature is perpetually distracting. Everything talks to you, greets you, demands your attention

Lastly, you are not alone because when you walk you soon become two. Especially after walking for a long time. What I mean is that even when I am alone, there is always this dialogue between the body and the soul.

When I am walking I accompany myself, I am two. And that endlessly relaunched conversation can last all day without boredom. We can’t walk without this split, which is how we feel ourselves making progress.