Barefoot on Sand: a walk about walking

I was in Shanghai recently and went for a walk. I realized that my gait could be improved if I let my arms swing more loosely and made more of a point to get posture and muscular control right. I have both taken and made tours on all sorts of subjects and about a crazy assortment of places but it was a revelation to make a walk where the subject of the walk was the physical act of walking itself. Arriving in Xiamen I had a hunch I should continue with the experiment and take advantage of the cities clean beaches. I resolved to walk barefoot on sand for an hour as an experiment. 

I began at this tall statue, the emblem for the Golden Rooster Film Festival, the Chinese equivalent of the Oscars. The festival is held in Xiamen annually and is an excuse for the film industry from Shanghai and Beijing to have a few days of gorging themselves on seafood in the sun. On the other side of the water, the Taiwanese version is called the Golden Horse and this got me thinking about Golden animals, prestige and films. It sparked the idea for a film festival of my own which might well just happen: The Golden Cockroach! If only for that, this walk was a success as it gave me a name and concept for a future event.

The walk began with the shoes coming off and the ever so slightly smelly feet coming into contact with the warm dry sand. Starting from a standing position, I spent time feeling the weight passing down through the feet and the spine reaching up, getting a sense of relaxed verticality. When walking, there is so much else going on that it becomes much more difficult to focus on these basics so it is good to start off with good posture. I found my feet became much more sensitive and alive when in contact with the sand released from the prison of shoe ware. This in turn gave me more feeling about where precisely my weight was distributed. 

I set off along the beach leaving a trail of footsteps behind me. I settled into a rhythm that let the arms swing fully and lungs breathe in the sea air. Focus was more up and outwards as the sand didn't present obstacles or contain sharp objects that might damage the feet. It was only after a while that I looked down and I realized I was not alone. There are worms living in the tidal area of sand near the shoreline. I'm not sure if it's the same ones, but I was once convinced to try eating worms dug up from the sand here. To be precise, the skin of these worms, set in jelly with a hot sauce smeared over it; it's a local delicacy. All I can say is I tried it once and won't be touching it ever again.

The walk continued and I was in luck, the tide was right out so I could pass around the rocks and continue a long way, walking solely on the sand. The angle of the sand sloping down to the water makes the weight falls more onto one foot than another. This gentle asymmetry made me more aware of what I was doing higher up in the body, I could feel it all the way up to the neck. 

After a while I became more sensitive to the differences between coarse sand and fine sand, dry sand and wet sand. Each behaved very differently underfoot. I never would have expected to have found so much variation. These subtle changes in turn improved my posture as I was getting so much more sensation in my feet than I normally do when wearing shoes. It would be possible to do this for five minutes and experience this as information but doing it for longer was so much more rewarding as it becomes ongoing and sustained feedback. If you want to correct bodily habits, retrain bodily use, this longer sustained work is almost certainly more effective. It requires time and repetition for it to get inside your body and become second nature.

While the focus of this walk was on the act of walking itself, I was not on a treadmill, I was still walking somewhere. The sound of waves is quite good for letting go of chatter but thoughts keep popping up regardless. One thing that kept coming to me, for instance, was that I always used to hate the two towers in the distance, and now there's a new one currently being put up. They are dumb landmarks, notable only for their height, which turn into screens for kitsch once night falls. This mild irritation with them as they symbolize the wrong turn the city of Xiamen has taken, is perhaps why I ended up lived in one of them for a while: so I didn't have to look at it.

It's ironic that just as I was about to finish, I walked past a beach stall selling plastic sandals. I had gone further than anticipated and the hour walk turned into 90 minutes. I could already feel the skin between my toes getting worn down by the abrasive sand so I understand why people spending longer on the sand might want footwear. What this barefoot walk did for me, however, was to make me much more mindful of walking surfaces and gait. The first thing I did when I got home was to go through my shoes and make a careful analysis of each pair, seeing how it impacted my walking. This walk about walking was, therefore, not so much a performance as a really useful exercise. I will surely try it again and most probably also use it when teaching.