When my daughter was a newborn, I walked in loops. I pushed her in the stroller in circles around the reservoir, around the park, around blocks in our New Jersey suburb. The loops turned me inwards, toward a contemplative center, as if I were walking a monastic labyrinth.
I looped and reflected, looped and planned an essay about the links between walking and autobiographical writing. The essay would blend personal narrative and research, drawing on texts such as In Praise of Walking by neuroscientist Shane O’Mara, who explains that walking offers us a form of “active idleness.” It stimulates the brain’s default mode network, which is “involved in the construction of stories and narratives about ourselves, and the wider world in which we live.” I looped and let my mind wander, looped and recalled some of my walks in other places I have lived: Boston, São Paulo, Buenos Aires. My daughter slept.
In the spring of 2020, the pandemic broke apart those loops and their meditative quality. Every evening, COVID-19 statistics for our area flashed aggressively on the TV screen. I watched the numbers rise through March: 100; 1,000; 18,000 new cases by the end of the month. The halls of my apartment building seemed longer, narrower, darker. The elevator felt airless. I ventured outside hoping to make a mental outline of my essay.
The magnolia, dogwood, and cherry trees celebrated a string of cloudless days, but the blossoms aggravated allergies that, along with my increasing anxiety, tightened my chest. I tried to focus on the unwritten essay, but my thoughts were interrupted by memories of severe childhood asthma, the many nights I lay in bed half-asleep, struggling to breathe and listening to my parents debate whether they should bring me to the ER. My asthma is controlled now, but my body still holds the memory of being unable to fill my lungs completely. The essay would no longer be about my peaceful walks through other cities. I needed a new focus.
In those early days of the pandemic, classes moved online, and my partner and I no longer spent hours commuting to our respective universities to teach. Instead, we took turns pushing the stroller around our neighborhood. At each intersection we chose our direction based on whichever road seemed more deserted. We zig-zagged down blocks, crossing the street to avoid other people. We sometimes backtracked for the same reason. Our steps created chaotic designs on streets that we once followed in straight lines.
To reframe my essay, I turned to Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (tr. from French by Steven Rendell), which describes a “rhetoric of walking.” Pedestrians in the city write “an allusive and fragmentary story” that defies “programmed and regulated operations.” My partner and I walked with fear, in illegible patterns. Our daughter continued to sleep peacefully.
By summer, the number of new COVID-19 cases in New Jersey had declined and the three of us returned to loops, usually in the county park a block from our apartment. The paved path took us past basketball courts (still always full), a playground, a baseball field, and a free-standing set of bleachers with splintered wood. Little fitness stations and benches with the green paint peeling off lined the trail. Train tracks were visible through the thin strip of wooded area off the side of the path. Manhattan-bound trains occasionally sounded their horns as they rumbled past. The trains had a clear direction, but few passengers.
We walked the same loop every morning, but the days never felt repetitive. Our daughter, no longer a sleepy infant, pointed to every bird, examined the leaves we handed her, and clicked her tongue in imitation every time she saw a squirrel. Her fascination with the details of our surroundings shifted the focus of my essay to mindfulness and walking. I underlined passages in Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Peace is Every Step: “[Walk] not in order to arrive, but just to walk…Children, in particular, are very capable of practicing mindfulness and reminding others to do the same.” I bookmarked a New York Times article titled “An ‘Awe Walk’ Might Do Wonders for Your Well-Being” in which Gretchen Reynolds reports on the psychological benefits of walking while “watching for small wonders in the world.”
Then, for the first time since the start of lockdown, our loops began to regularly overlap with the movements of others. In our fear of the virus, my partner and I were still wary of other people. Since we were both working from home, we kept our daughter out of daycare. We didn’t travel. We didn’t visit friends or family. We rarely went anywhere besides the park, but there we began to see the same people over and over, each on their own loop, each veering from and interpreting the paved path differently.
I scrapped the mindfulness angle and decided the essay would be about the ways in which walking allowed us to build community through the pandemic.
Every morning we greeted:
A woman in workout gear who looped in the same direction as us, but much faster and without stopping.
The groundskeeper, who stepped in half triangles around the trail as he moved off the path to pick up trash. He formed a pattern that looked like a child’s drawing of the sun, with thick and irregular rays of light around the circle.
A restless man in his twenties, dreadlocks pulled back in a spandex cap, who shortened the loop by cutting across the grass. He was there mornings and afternoons doing pull-ups or pacing, always within fifty yards of his favorite fitness station. Nearly every day he commented on how big my daughter was getting.
A mother with a child about six months older than my daughter. She rarely followed any pattern. Instead, she crisscrossed the field in the middle of the park, chasing her toddler. I discovered later that the mother wrote for the theater.
A skinny young man, always dressed in black, who walked half the loop to one of the swings in the playground. He was always alone, always too old and too big for the swing, always there looking at the sky.
Together, we formed an indecipherable Venn diagram. I made little progress on my essay about community. I thought again of de Certeau: “The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility.”
On nice days, my partner and I stopped looping and walked into the middle of the field. We put a blanket on the ground and took our daughter out of the stroller. She crawled off the blanket onto the earth, pulling up fistfuls of grass with her chubby hands and examining ants. By the end of the summer, we held up her arms so she could take her first steps, barefoot across the grass. By early November, she was walking unassisted.
In the winter, I wanted to walk at a consistent pace, stretch my legs, observe my neighbors in their predictable paths through the park. I wanted to write an essay with a destination, a singular direction, or at least with a shape that could contain the movements of my community. Instead, I chased my daughter.
Rather than looping, she retraced her steps erratically: five steps forward, two steps back, six yards forward, one back. When it snowed, she’d fall after a step or two. Sometimes she waved at other people, more often not.
She formed trails with odd angles. She wandered off to dip her hands in icy puddles and, when the snow melted, she preferred muddy ground to the paved loop. It seemed we were never getting anywhere. I made no progress with my writing.
By spring of 2021, when pandemic restrictions briefly eased, she was running: a bouncing toddler run, more up and down than forward. She ran towards the swing-set or to the dandelions or to someone walking a dog or to a park bench or to a piece of trash that looked like a treasure or to the geese sitting in the middle of the field. Her direction was often impossible to predict.
Drawing on Jean-François Augoyard’s Step by Step: Everyday Walks in a French Urban Housing Project (tr. David Ames Curtis), de Certeau argues that the rhetoric of walking is marked by synecdoche (the part for the whole or vice versa) and asyndeton (the omission of conjunctions). As a result, “every walk constantly leaps, or skips like a child, hopping on one foot.”
As my daughter learned to walk, she learned to speak. Her words, like her steps, formed a fragmented narrative. “Dog, swing, baby,” she said to describe a morning in the park. Destinations described by synecdoche. Always the conjunctions missing.
I struggled to write this essay even when I believed I was the singular author. Now my daughter continually reminds me that our steps intersect with the movements of those around us in illegible patterns. The rhetoric of walking resists order.
This essay will be about my baby growing up. It will be about the changing nature of our walks through the seasons and the pandemic. It will be about my inability to contain all this movement.