Walking Fast, Walking Slow

I’m wondering about the difference between walking really fast and really slow? Which is harder? Which is better for us? More reflections from the different paths we travel.

Sometimes I try to walk as fast as I can. At other time I walk so slowly I practically fall over. That’s because I do power walks and I do labyrinth walks. They are very different feelings: marching up the Big Sur coast doing 15 minute miles, or pensively taking a step every 10 seconds or so in a gentle circle.

The “Power Walk,” is a part of the annual Big Sur International Marathon. If you don’t want to run the 26.2 mile marathon, you can walk a mere 21 miles. The longer race starts in Big Sur, and is predominantly solo men, 5000 folks running fast as the wind to the Carmel finish line. The Power Walk starts an hour later, and five miles north, at Andrew Molera State Park. 1500 walkers, mostly women in groups, walk pretty damn fast. But unlike the silent solo men we women keep ourselves going by chatting away all the way up the magnificent rocky coastline.

We have to walk fast because the highway is closed for only 5 hours. Some power walkers do some running as well as walking, but not me (protecting my knees.) So I have to walk at least 4 miles an hour, looking every 15 minutes for a mile marker. Once I did the walk alone, when my friend dropped out sick at the last minute. It was not nearly as much fun, and I cut off from the crowd half way there and just walked home. But in a group, powerfully striding along while discussing husbands as only middle aged women can do, we can get to town in a miracle 5 hours and feel great!

Not far from the Carmel finish line is the labyrinth at the Community Church of the Monterey Peninsula, where I first learned to slow walk. Labyrinths are the opposite of power walks and marathons. The point is not the finish line or besting your previous time, but simply following the one path (it’s not a maze), meditating quietly with each step. Indeed there isn’t a finish line at all. It’s like going from Big Sur to Carmel and then turning around and going back. Except that you do it slowly, no hurry, no cheering crowds at the end. You enter at the outside, walk in and around the winding lines until finally reaching the center. Maybe a brief pause there, and then you turn around and walk out. And there is no time limit on how quickly you have to get it done. This outdoor labyrinth is always open.

When the minister first proposed this outdoor community labyrinth the church’s board of trustees objected – it would bring strangers to the church grounds at all hours and they might fall and sue. This was 25 years ago when labyrinths were sort of new in modern churches and I too was a bit skeptical of their trendiness. But then I started hearing people tell stories of having been so wounded by the church of their youth that they never wanted to enter one again. Until they walked a labyrinth and felt some healing and welcome home. I figured if it helped people feel welcome and whole, and if it was so threatening to those old fart trustees, it might be a good thing, and I should give it a try.

Luckily I had a good teacher in that minister, who taught me it’s not a race, not a goal, no one will send me certificate of completion like I get in the mail after the power walk. He taught me to walk slowly, step by step, to notice how it feels to get close to the center and then be led off and away, only to return by another loop. He taught me to stand at the entrance and say a prayer and wait for the right moment to enter; no “ready, set, go” of the timed power walk. And to let the experience sink in after leaving the labyrinth, not to leap for joy and rush to pick up my T–shirt in the marathon tent.

I’ve walked this labyrinth many times, by candlelight on New Year’s Eve, as part of a friend’s celebration of her 20 years of sobriety, at an interfaith Earth Day service, and just stopping by on my way to pick up my daughter at the middle school next door. Each time my monkey mind slows down, my soul finds rest. Labyrinth walkers go solo and silent even in a group setting, sort of like the marathoners. Sometimes I think we gabbing women power walkers miss something with all our chatting. Listening to long distance running men afterwards, they seem to have had more of a spiritual experience. Surely I am more “spiritual” alone on the labyrinth.

But maybe I am trying to make too much of a distinction here between fast and slow, competitive and contemplative, group and solo. Am I assuming that we are only spiritual when we are quiet and alone and non-competitive? Fast walkers trying to get to a finish line aren’t necessarily just compulsive overachievers. After 21 miles we have bonded with nature and each other and gotten our hearts pumping like mad – surely all that is good for our souls?

Fast walking makes me feel whole and good and happy. And in some ways fast walking is the easier way to connect with something beyond myself. Slow walking can be really frustrating and make me impatient, and is sort of lonely.

I guess I will keep doing both. Both get me “in the zone.” I can quiet my monkey mind with happy companionship as much as I can with slow steps and silent prayers.

Or I could combine the fast and slow into a kind of sauntering, such as Thoreau speaks of in his essay, “Walking:”

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre" — to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a sainte-terrer", a saunterer — a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense…..So we saunter toward the Holy Land; till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, so warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in Autumn.”

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter