PICTURE: If ever there needed to be a reason to justify taking a walk, one of them would have to be to reduce stress. So tell your family and friends you’re going flaneuring for a while – and get ready to explain what on earth you’re talking about.

Stepping out the French way – Flaneuring
Positing a different spin on putting one foot after the other

HOW MANY DIFFERENT VARIATIONS on the theme of walking can there be? Well here’s another one we bumped into on our walk through the Lake Mac library catalogue. The Art of Flaneuring: How to Wander with Intention and Discover a Better Life, by Erika Owen, can seem like just one more excuse to write about one of the most ordinary of activities, walking. But rather than wave it aside as an excuse to publish a book, Owen makes the case for thinking about walking in a much more expansive way.

To go flaneuring can be refreshing in so many ways. It helps us create new mental maps, to disrupt old ruts in our neuropathways, building up new muscles to keep us fresh and alert. Check the psychogeography link to get a more complete background to this way of experiencing our natural and human constructed world.

Let’s see if we can pay more attention to the wonderful plants and animals we come across as we walk at Munibung Hill. It will do us good to appreciate as many aspects of nature as we can – to be less distracted, to be more mindful, to be in it and of it as Ian McCallum says. To be thankful for the gifts of the Earth, so freely given. HAPPY FLANEURING.

MMM … Issue 38, June – July 2023