If I asked you to name an activity that costs nothing, is accessible to basically everyone, and is also excellent for your health, I’m guessing that walking would make it close to the top of the list.
There are countless physical and mental benefits to going for a stroll. You don’t need to purchase any particular gear or special outfit to walk. Even shoes are optional. You can start walking from wherever you are, whenever the desire and opportunity strikes. Walking is also a whole body-mind-and-soul sensory experience that is slow enough to actually take it in. The moment one starts, the feeling of being fully alive settles in and stays.
A while ago I went through a difficult time in my life and turned to walking to heal. I loved it so much that I set increasingly ambitious goals for myself.
At the start of this year, I decided to try to walk every street in San Antonio. According to my app, I have so far completed 93 of 13,643 streets in the city, a mere 0.68%. Even in that minuscule amount, I have felt all the acknowledged benefits of regularly stepping outside, but I have also discovered something new.
In trying to check off more new streets, I have become a much more aware and present resident of this city. I have strolled through the cemeteries of the Eastside, making crayon rubbings of gravestones with my children. I have discovered hidden parks, intriguing houses old and new, and buildings so rich in history that you can sense it just by being in proximity. I have seen what gentrification looks like and feels like. I have seen what deep poverty looks like and feels like. I have understood the big picture plans of the city government to revitalize disenfranchised areas. I have said hello to people from all backgrounds imaginable. I can feel the outlines in my heart and mind of what this city was, what it is now, and what it could be.
What I have discovered is that walking isn’t just a “me” activity. Even when we walk alone, it is a “we” activity. Walking is a justice practice, especially when we choose to amble the streets of our neighborhood. In a time when making real, personal connection with others is increasingly difficult, walking makes us physically present in our community, passing by the front yards of our neighbors, nodding to dog owners, parents pushing strollers, and the unhoused. Walking is a starting point that leads to deeper connection with our community. It is an invitation to others to connect in our shared public space.
And when we purposefully walk in neighborhoods that are new to us, particularly neighborhoods that have been marginalized and under-resourced, we become a part of the struggle for justice. We quite literally strap on our sandals of the gospel of peace (Ephesians 6:15). We can choose not to be satisfied with the narratives that society gives us for “the other,” instead we can walk where they walk and see what they see. We can say hello to whomever we pass as a visitor, a neighbor, and a fellow human being.
We can understand the struggle better, though never completely. We can learn new narratives of goodness, beauty, and light in places and in people that we never even noticed before through the noiseless, blur of our car windows. We can see the humanity in those that have been so dehumanized by the system that it is almost as if they don’t exist to us at all. We can embody with our legs and feet our hope for justice and peace.
And yet still, I constantly have to push myself to get out of my bubble. It is a discipline to go for a walk outside of a 1-mile radius around my house. Indeed, before I made this mildly absurd goal of walking every street in the city, I hadn’t once actually stepped foot on a single city street in the entire Eastside, even though I live no more than two houses from the highway that separates my neighborhood from that one.
The Know Your Neighbor program asks us to consider how we might better connect with our neighbors–bridging our social and ideological divides, learning more about one another. But I think there is an adjacent question that we must also ask: who do you call your neighbor? In a place where the scars of housing segregation are still tangible, how might you find a way to call people who live 2 blocks or 20 blocks or 200 blocks away, your neighbor? And how might that change you and change this city?
That is the question that walking as a justice-practice challenges us to ask and then to answer, one step at a time.