The story of the departure ceremony (8): ‘Walking is a venting of the soul’

Fortunately, the Departure Ceremony/Pilgrim’s Lauds of the Walk of Wisdom on June 5 in the Stevenskerk in Nijmegen took place again, yet the new tradition “to record the text in advance” is now firmly anchored in the DNA of the Walk of Walk of Wisdom. In this way, the contribution of pilgrim Ton Reijnders, the text by Joke Hermsen, can also be heard.

The text for each Departure Ceremony comes from the book ‘Seasons of Life: a contemporary book of hours and pilgrims’.

Below you will find the text as recorded by Ton.

June, the ‘month of roses’, is still the most beautiful month for walking. The fields are full of blooming poppies, daisies and cornflowers, which unintentionally and unconsciously recall Monet’s colour palette. There is still a freshness about the land that invites you to throw the door wide open, explore the spaces around and go out into the wide world. In June, I usually walk in the French Burgundy, where a few years ago I bought an old inn with some friends, which to my delight is only a few kilometers from the old pilgrimage route to Santiago di Compostela.

Walking is the ideal start of the day for me, because walking and philosophizing belong together like the poppies in the fields, the white Charolais cows in the meadows: walking into the world means thinking about the world. By the way, thinking walking is not something that the walker has to consciously resolve, because it happens completely by itself. As soon as we stretch our legs, our mind also starts moving. As soon as we put one foot in front of the other, space is created around us and in our thoughts. That is probably why there were so many philosophers, from Aristotle to Walter Benjamin, who declared walking, strolling or strolling to be an indispensable part of their thinking. Ann Meskens talks about this very infectiously in her book Finally Outside (2008), in which she also describes the followers of Aristotle, who were called ‘walking thinkers’ – the peripatetics – because their teacher taught alone walking through the corridors of the Athenian gymnasium Lukeion .

Walking and wisdom have been linked since ancient times, because walking thinking means giving free rein to your thoughts, not letting them be limited in advance by rules and laws, not wanting to follow a tight, straight road, but daring to take many unknown side roads and occasionally a false track. “My pen must go the same way as my feet,” Montaigne wrote. He turned thinking into a free ‘essaying’ – literally: trying, trying – and thus gave birth to a new genre – the essay. This form of thinking is not about wanting to know in advance where you will go or where you will end up, but purely about starting from where you are. Searching, groping, searching and occasionally getting stuck in the bushes are part of every creative form of thinking. Nietzsche, who took daily long walks through the mountains around Sils Maria in Switzerland, went even further: ‘Only the thoughts walked on have value’, he wrote. Because hiking not only offers surprising views, but also provides the mind with new insights.

Every year we walk a new part of the centuries-old pilgrimage path in Burgundy, which is still surprisingly quiet in early summer. The first hike we made started from Vezelay and then crawled up through the hills, so that at every turn we got a possibly even more beautiful view of the high, medieval town. Then the path meandered into the woods, as dark as it was dense, where birds of prey circled above the high treetops, deer ran away from the path in fright, and we had to do our best not to step on the orange slugs crawling around. During the first hour of a walk, I’m still looking for the right rhythm, and then it’s especially important to keep walking. At a certain point I find the right cadence and mind and body become more and more attuned to each other; They no longer get in each other’s way, no longer fight for precedence, but form a harmonious trotting pair that I very rarely experience as such during most everyday activities.

After a few hours of walking, I’m no longer calculating distances or counting kilometers; All calculating thoughts have disappeared from my mind and are making way for a deeper and above all much more intense reflection. It is actually pure freedom in which my thinking ends up: memories, fragments of thoughts, images and visions bubble up and disappear again. My mind is constantly exploring new horizons of new fields of thought, and does so in a very associative and intuitive way. It is precisely thanks to the free rein that my thoughts take while walking that I get many an idea or discovery: often at the end of a walk I know what the first sentences of a new chapter or the title of a novel or essay will read. For example, during that first walk from Vezelay, I thought that my essay on time and soul would be named after a quote by Nietzsche: Silence of the soul.

Since then I have continued to walk, in the Burgundian hills, but also in the city, by the sea or on the heath. Walking is cathartic for body and mind. Once back home, I not only feel lighter, but also richer and more balanced than when I left. Walking is also a form of taking care of the soul, which was one of the most important tasks of man according to the ancient Greek philosophers. It is about offering space to who you really are and breathing into what is stirring and moving under the surface.

So leave your car, bike or scooter at home more often and don’t forget how to walk. Because walking is a form of airing the soul.

Joke Hermsen, Writer and philosopher. In her book ‘Stil de Tijd’ (Quiet Time) she wonders if there is another, more personal time than clock time.

If you want to participate in a Departure Ceremony, keep an eye on the agenda .