wHen I returned to London from Rome just before the second lockdown in 2020. I found a city that was barely welcomed. Young single people like me were only dating existing friends online, and the opportunity to make fresh connections was rare.
When I met Ilenka in Poland at the Literary Festival, she was just as thirsty for her new friend as I did. When we started complaining about the difficulties of mingling, she introduced me to an app that lets people find new companions on organized walks. I downloaded it immediately.
On my first walk, a six-mile walk along the banks of the River Lee in eastern London – I met Harris from Greece. While we were exploring, she explained to me that she had been staying on the couch of a friend I recently met on a walk since her grandmother had passed away (they had lived together). This friend went for the walk after being encouraged by one of her friends.
As someone who is far better at slowly cooked friendship gaining flavor over time, I trust Ilenka and how quickly she repositions her life around them I was surprised at how it would do it. However, I was becoming a friend of Ilenka, who had an amazing Aracity at an amazing moment, and the same thing happened on my next walk. I made newer friends. This kind of thing never happened to me at bars or parties. A traditional place for socializing. So I began to wonder why these walks were so different, and I realized that it relates to the balance between interpersonal exchange and the outside world.
Bars and clubs need to interact with people. During the walk, we pay attention to the surrounding environment. This shift in focus makes it easier to make friends like this, it seems to make that focus easier.
The lockdown has made it a better recognition of the boundaries between self-sufficiency and the need for others, and the boundaries between nesting and exploring the outside world. The flats and homes that were always our shelter have suddenly become prisons. We knew something was missing, and it was not a person or outdoors: it was both at the same time.
It explains why walking meditation and walking psychotherapy are so popular not only in London but also in other European and American cities. It’s like after we realised that we suffered from the claustrophobic pain of having too many of our companies (who forgets how our concerns were amplified by the four walls of our home) ?), we had to discover new ways of combining, as well as necessary contemplation and conversation: we missed out on human connections as much as we missed out on outdoor connections.
But this is nothing new. Europe has a long history of concepts that emerged in the 1950s between a radical group of artists based in Paris and concept theorists. In fact, this also focused on personal connections to locations while exploring urban environments.
Originally, influenced by its powerful Dadaist and Surrealist, it focused on casual and subconscious disorder. But a modern post-pandemic version of it seeks to bring order and strictness to overwhelming life. If traditional psychogeography was rooted in dérives that literally go “drifting” without a planned route, then a preferred tactic for many modern walking is to follow a well-organized route.
I’m really good friends with Irenka and Harris right now. We like to walk and talk, and never hang out in our flats. Instead, they enjoy exploring the city on foot. In recent years, there has been a lot of emphasis on mindful meditation and other types of individual self-care, but I have found that changing my focus on the outside world from myself works better.
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And I’m not alone. After all, the practice of Japan’s Shinrin Yek (or forest bathing) is currently practiced throughout Europe. There is also a new scientific discipline on how nature can improve our health, and mental health practitioners around the world are beginning to talk outdoors. But I believe that, along with nature’s ability to recover, we can also hope for a revitalization effect of urban space. They can also act as a rich, symbolic map, and have the power to divert us from self-obsession and normal, everyday neurosis.
That’s why I prefer to play “minded style” instead of mindfulness. That’s what I call my long walk with the new friends I’m making. We are post-pandemic hulanudes. Like the romantic stroller described by the 19th century French poet and writer Charles Baudelaire. We sometimes drift in spirit, deepening our friendship, making our lack of a walk destination the whole of their purpose.
Flaunu was not popular by rejecting the negligence of busy, modern working life. But now is the best time to regenerate it. After all, all cities are still “Traumascape” in a way. It is a space that is transformed by collective memories of blockade. By walking, we give it and ourselves a chance to heal and reinvent it.
Several names have been changed
