A Short Guide to Barefoot Walking
I do a lot of walking, and a lot of walking barefoot, regularly exploring roads, sidewalks, fields, and woods in this scandalous state of undress. When people learn this, they generally have some questions for me, questions like: why?
I have never really been able to answer this question, so here is an essay on the topic.
The simplest and probably most truthful answer to the question is that I've been doing it since I was a kid, when my brothers and I would spend summers on a cattle farm in rural Ohio, and I kept doing it when I got older because some of my brothers did too and I thought it was kinda cool and I don't know, it was something to do, you know?
In the eyes of the general public, though, barefoot walking has gained a great deal of mystique that is almost entirely unjustified. I promise that I do not walk barefoot to gain health benefits in regard to my posture, or because I want to be in closer touch with the Earth my mother. Barefoot running is supposedly good for you, and lots of people now wear barefoot-shoes to imitate the barefoot stride, but to be honest every time I've tried to run barefoot I've gotten horrible shinsplints. Go figure.
Still, I think the above qualifies this essay as CULTURALLY RELEVANT. So if you, dear reader, ever feel compelled to try to get into walking barefoot, here is a Guide to the topic, which mostly explains in great detail why you absolutely should not get into walking barefoot. It is divided into BULLET POINTS and STEPS, which are all out of order, and culminates in a mystical ramble on the nature of intelligence and divinity. I'm sorry.
Once upon a time, I was returning from a long walk on the sidewalks and roads and woods of Carrboro and met on the sidewalk two older women, one of whom smiled at me and said, "Oh, that must feel so good!" I smiled and nodded, but then immediately paused and thought: "Wait, no, that's not right at all, the only thing I've feeling right now in my feet is pain."
So here is BULLET POINT no. 1: WALKING BAREFOOT IS MOSTLY REALLY PAINFUL AND SOMETIMES DANGEROUS.
Presumably, the woman in question fell into the general category of pro-barefoot non-barefoot-walkers: people whose experience of going barefoot has been generally confined to their own carpeted houses, the beach, and very very well-kept grass-covered lawns. In these circumstances, walking barefoot does indeed feel quite nice, at least for brief periods.
However, in 99% of all other circumstances, walking barefoot involves some significant degree of pain. Asphalt and concrete wear down your feet and cause the bottom of your feet to burn and sting; most fields contain sticks, stones, and/or prickles that jab your feet and cause sharp pain; gravel is the most exquisitely painful material of all and should be labeled as a crime against humanity by the Hague. This is all assuming the climate is temperate, and that the ground does not freeze or burn your feet.
Likewise, when you start walking barefoot, the bottoms of your feet will be extremely delicate and extremely prone to being cut, scratched, and/or impaled by any number of environmental hazards that you may or may not even notice. The good news, though, is that they will rapidly develop calluses that will gradually get tougher until they become impervious to most minor threats. After years of doing this myself, I have walked over broken glass and not been harmed (or noticed). Unfortunately, even when a given rock or weapon no longer poses a threat to your feet's epidermal integrity, it will still probably be painful. I step on rocks all the time that leave no mark, but still hurt like heck.
Hence, STEP ONE (also FINAL STEP, also KIND OF THE WHOLE PROCESS) in learning to walk barefoot is to gradually, very gradually, extremely gradually increase your pain tolerance and the callouses on the bottom of your feet through constant use. Good luck.
This leads in to BULLET POINT no. 2: WALKING BAREFOOT IS EXTREMELY SLOW AND INEFFICIENT IN ALMOST ANY TERRAIN.
When you walk barefoot a lot, you realize very quickly why people invented shoes: the human foot is a remarkably poor instrument for locomotion on almost any terrain. Another main barrier to walking barefoot is consequently to get better at measuring how hard a given patch of ground will be to walk over, and get better at moving over uneven terrain and especially spotting and avoiding obstacles and things likely to hurt you. As a shoe-walker, you see a nice field, and plow straight through without even looking at the ground; as a barefoot-walker, you pick your way across it, carefully avoiding the prickles, the sticks, the random rocks, and so forth.
STEP TWO (which is really STEP ONE and also STEP THESE ARE REALLY ALL SIMULTANEOUS AND NOT STEPS) in learning to walk barefoot is thus to gradually increase your general awareness of your environment and general nimbleness until you can reliably approach unfamiliar terrain and work your way across it.
BULLET POINT no.3 is an attempt to salvage this in a positive direction: IF YOU PERSEVERE IN WALKING BAREFOOT YOU WILL EVENTUALLY PERHAPS GAIN CERTAIN INTANGIBLE BENEFITS AND INSIGHTS INTO REALITY BUT THERE'S NO NEED SINCE I WILL JUST TELL YOU WHAT THEY ARE.
First, yeah, sometimes you walk over things that feel nice or at least interesting; also shoes are sometimes uncomfortable, like if it's really hot outside.
When you walk barefoot regularly, though, you are reminded very vividly of a number of basic things that it's very easy to forget, especially for people living in a very technological civilization like ours. The first and most immediate is simply that craft, techne, is natural and necessary to man. The overwhelming majority of people could not walk across the road or a woodland clearing or a lawn without shoes--that is, without personalized products of human intelligence and craftsmanship. Whatever we are, we are not merely animals with some additional skills and abilities. Our bodies are so permeated by the intelligence of our souls that they can neither survive nor even function in the most basic ways in the absence of intelligence and its products.
Then, too, walking barefoot reminds you forcefully that the first and most immediate end of human technology is not to express human individuality or increase human power to god-like proportions, but simply to aid the human body in fulfilling its most basic functions: helping it to walk down the street, so to speak.
Then, I think you realize something even more important: that the hallmark of humanity and human intelligence is sensitivity. The thing that most of all will resist your efforts to learn to walk barefoot is not the physical qualities of your feet, but their extraordinary sensitivity to what they walk over, and your own extraordinary sensitivity to those feelings. Most things you walk over will not harm you, but most of them will cause you pain. It is this, above all, that renders man useless by the standards of the animal world.
Properly considered, this extraordinary sensitivity is simply the essence of intelligence--and it is much more pervasive than we like to think. Aquinas and Aristotle alike tell us that the mind itself is distinguished by the greatest possible degree of sensitivity and receptivity towards other things, such that it not only receives impressions from them, like our bodily organs, but becomes them as they are in themselves. Be this as it may, even our bodies are marked, and indeed totally altered, by human intelligence, to such an extent that it is impossible merely to use our bodies merely as bodies, and not as carriers for perception and intelligence. Our bodies, most of the time, are engaged not simply in carrying out their own proper functions, but also and above all in telling us, with a rather extreme degree of intensity and detail, about what is happening with them and their functions and the surrounding world and why these things are good or bad or indifferent, helpful or hurtful, and so on. In walking barefoot, our poor feet are so engaged in this process that it renders them all but useless for most people, most of the time, for actually carrying out their own proper functions of walking.
This is an especially important corrective for people living in societies such as ours, where technological aids have become so pervasive as to become for most people a kind of second nature set over and dominating the first. We receive our knowledge of ourselves, of our bodies, minds, natures, and essential ends, not from our bodies and minds or those of others, but from the technological means of intelligence, images and symbols and text, and the external implements by which society and other people and us discipline and control our bodies and minds and souls. We identify with those technological means to such a degree that we can no longer distinguish them from our selves. Rather than relating them to our bodies and minds as means to help our own natures achieve their ends, we relate our bodies and minds to technology as imperfect means for fulfilling the higher, more glorious purposes of our technological-symbolic gods.
If we take technological means as the standard for intelligence, though, we are apt to make very many very large mistakes. One of the worst and most common is to identify intelligence essentially with indifference and insensitivity.
A steel sword is essentially indifferent to the ends to which it is put, and insensible to the armor, blood, and guts it passes through. It achieves its ends, we might say, in manner that excels even the animal world in efficiency, without any of the hindrances that come with sensitivity and intelligence.
If this is our model for intelligence, we will attempt to reshape our selves, bodies, minds, and souls, into better and more efficient tools for external, technological ends. Most modern cults, whether religious or secular, political or "lifestyle," have this for their underlying ethos--and they frequently succeed to remarkable, and indeed grotesque, degrees.
All of this, though, is essentially to misunderstand the nature of intelligence, and the relationship between intelligence and those other principles, natural or technological, which it makes use of. It does belong, if not essentially, certainly fittingly, to intelligence to make use of non-intelligent things, and especially non-intelligent energies and powers, to achieve its own purposes: but its own essential purposes, and its own essential powers, are interior, receptive, and sensitive, not external, dominating, and indifferent.
A volcano erupting, pouring out its energy and native power to the fullest possible extent, indifferent to all other things and itself, is an image of the non-intelligent. For an image of intelligence, imagine all the force and energy and native power of that volcano pouring itself out from within to achieve the sole end of powering a single night-light for a small child. Gentleness, in the sense of the directing of vast power in the service of small, delicate, things, is an essential feature of intelligence.
All this is, of course, a very Chestertonian point to make. In opposition to the brutalitarian Imperialists of his own time, Chesterton often pointed to the cabbage as a model of Nietzschean strength and indifference to morality and truth; and in some of his more mystical fragments, he speaks of the most truly human and divine man as the one not most above and indifferent to the world, but the one most extended into the world, a man for whom the trees and flowers themselves are networks of nerves, a man feeling with and in every living thing. In this, he was merely echoing Maximus the Confessor and other Catholic authors, who pointed to the God-Man as the one person capable of suffering and experiencing with and in the totality of humanity, making all of humanity and the whole cosmos into his own body.
To return from these heights to the humble depths of this ludicrous essay, walking barefoot is difficult precisely because of the overabundance of sensation and experience it provides. The shoe as technological implement shields us from that, and thereby allows us to achieve our higher purposes--which involve walking across a gravel driveway, say, without looking at the ground and wincing a lot--much better. In this it plays the role of all technology: harnessing the insensitive and non-intelligent for intelligent purposes. Yet in shielding us from experience and perception--not least the experience and perception of our own dependence and sensitivity--it carries with it a certain price.
I do not in the least recommend barefoot walking to anyone who does not already happen to do it. For the benefits it provides relative to the costs it is, objectively, not at all worth it.
Nonetheless, if there's one thing I would like you to take away from this essay, it is this. The next time you put on your shoe, take a moment to pause and reflect on the bargain you are making--a bargain almost certainly repeated, to far greater and far worse effect, elsewhere in your life. You are acting as an intelligent, powerful human being, making use of the nonintelligent for your own, higher purposes; you are shielding yourself from unnecessary, counterproductive perception and pain: but you are giving up, in return, just a little bit of sensitivity. Nota bene.
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