Chairman of the Board of Vierdaagse Feesten walks walk of wisdom

It is with extraordinary pride that I announce that Walter Hamers, the chairman of the board of the Four Days Marches Festivities, has signed up for a ‘walk of wisdom’. He has made it known to run on the theme of freedom. 

Walter Hamers is the first director of a large organization to publicly sign up for a walk of wisdom. I like that, because I hope that the Walk of Wisdom will grow into a place where there is not only room for personal reflection, but also for social reflection. We live in the age of individualism, but man is not an island and every society needs places to reflect on common themes. Not in the oppressive way of the past – you either belonged to one or the other club – but in a way that leaves space. The searching character of pilgrimage fits in perfectly with this. 

Walter Hamers opts for the freedom of research, to run on an issue and to work on it physically. A tried and tested method that philosophers such as Kant and Nietzsche liked to use to clarify their thoughts. That is perfectly possible here: the vastness of the river landscape, the swaying of the trees in the old forests, the hills and valleys, the fields full of grass. What a pilgrimage adds to the philosophers’ method is togetherness. The symbolic connection with other pilgrims: each one a person on his way. 

I wish the chairman of the board of the Four Days Marches a good journey. And I hope that he will inspire other leaders to also start running on a theme that concerns them. With the sole purpose of becoming a little wiser while walking. Finally, I hope that more people dare to take a walk of wisdom on a theme. I think it would be interesting to hear at the end of a few days of walking whether they have become a little – even if only a little – wiser. When that piece of wisdom is then shared, the route is a success for me.