Walking expresses free will.
Walking is not much of a sport. There was a time of competitive walk races. Participants had to exaggerate their hip movements so that they could manage to lock their knees with each step, that the definition of a walk rather than a run, and it looked awkward and ridiculous and overly constrained, very different from running, which seems graceful and streamlined and natural, as if people had taken wing. Running races is as old as the Iliad, even if none of the Hebrews in the Bible did sports unless David and his fellow shepherds competed with slingshots, but there is no citation of that.
Even minor hiking up hills and not very high mountains is more of a sport than walking. You compete with gravity and other aspects of nature. You need stamina and how ro choose where to take your steps to make your path easier. There are aesthetic pleasures in minor hiking: the kaleidoscope of trees and glens and tangled roots that can’t be reduced or resolved into straight lines but remain complex and, in many senses, organic. There are the canopies of trees that allow looking down on a clearing, all the pleasures of landscape paintings, including the mixture of textures of rock and earth and foliage. But hardly a race either against time or another human.
Walking, rather, is more of a pastime, something to do to experience passing the time without an objective and so just being sociable ort even just unencumbered. Walking is therefore like casual card playing or watering the lawn or the tomatoes or keeping company with the dog or even doing minor tasks like fueling the car or unpacking groceries that, even if useful, are more just the ordinary things, the familiar things, that make you alive, like taking a dump. The point of a pastime is that it is not to be stressful.
I have been a walker for fifty years now, recommended to me by a doctor so as to keep fit, exercise always recommended, and I do what doctors say even though I prefer to be sedentary and so I walk as an obligation rather than a pleasure even though I do like fresh air and seeing people on the streets and I think I feel better for the exercise. I used to walk a mile down and then back up West End Avenue in Manhattan, a flat corridor I regarded as a cheap version of an oval at a gym, and still do half a mile one way and then back from a convenience store nearby my house. I have to press myself to do it and manage it three times a week. It is so boring. But it supposedly keeps me alive and, as a pastime, is part of being alive.
Walking, however, is like real sports in that it has meaning in that an interpretation is engendered by the experience of the activity. A tennis player learns that if you have stamina and speed, you can cover the entirety of the court and so have a sense of mastery. A basketball player learns that repetition can improve eye hand coordination so that you can hit more of your baskets. What walkers learn is that you can adjust your short term goals so as to accomplish the persistence of the long term goal, which is to complete the distance you want to cover.
When I walk my six very long blocks round trip, I can break it up by stopping at a stone bench and a stone wall on which I can sit not so much as to rest but to contemplate how far I have comed and how far I still have to go. Or I can measure the cross streets as markers ofc process. Then again, I can treat a landmark house, either particularly large or still being reconstructed, as an immediate goal rather than the ultimate goal, which is to get home and sit again next to my computer, which is the home base. And if I am bored enough, I will even note that I have only five or six lots between myself and my home. Every yardstick can be more and more divided even if the total remains the same.
The genius of sports and pastimes is that goals set are arbitrary even ifc the activities are based on real life activities like running or archery. People decide to race one another rather than just cover a distance by marching quickly so your own soldiers can catch up with a weakened enemy. Sports and pastimes are therefore abstracted and symbolic rather than practical. You beat your competitor in a hundred yard dash by a fraction of a second and the point is to win, as arbitrary as a goal to put more basketballs into baskets, according to certain scoring rules like free throws and three point plays, than does the competitive team. People care a great deal about these symbolic victories and engaging in sporting contests could be considered a great achievement and people scale their achievements in that someone got to be a state champion rather than a national medalist and feel satisfied to have earned that laurel. At worst, everyone can compete to accomplish their own personal best, even if it just means a duffer golfer just manages to lower his or her handicap.
Now apply what is learned from the fanciful to the real. People in their ordinary lives also establish goals, some in personal life, so as to gain an acceptable spouse even if years aftertwards the person is not a trophy but a life mate not comparable to other spouses because you have become so tied to on e another as a distinct thing. Similarly, there is a race to get tbhe kind of carteer you wqnt and hope to be prosperous or acclaimed as a result, but the career also becomes a way ofc life which is an expression of what you are whatever laurels are atgtached to it. You want your bosses and peers to praise you but also allow you to pursue your job or vocation.
People in ordinary life also have aims or goals that fill up the day, whether to go to a supermarket or feed the dog or pick up a child from school or have an easy bowel movement or get a paper done for an academic paper or even just move from the coach to an easy chair. These are all choices, the inevitable ones as well as the heroicor devious ones. What makes ordinary and spectacular choices like sporting fraces is that these are eitgher/or matters, whether they are accomplished or not rather than half way measures. You win the race or not; you get a sandwich from your kitchen. If you don’t complete the sandwich, you have failed to make it, while filling a puzzle halfway remains incomplete hether you have become bored or too taxing. So actions are complete or incomplete and the insight from sports is that thjethy are eithber accomplished orf not and judged by that as having been good or not, a judgmentg God, like other people do, when they have done a day’s work. Everyone, every day and innumerable times, is satisfied or victorious in a competition with natural, social and psychologikcal life. You minded your temper and that was good and you failed to and won der why.
One way to divide aims or contests is by looking at which ones are age appropriate. Children want to please parents and gain friends and succeed in school and grow up. Teenagers want sexual contact and a sense of what they will become, what their identities will be even if they already have them. Young adults have goals concerning careers and stable personal relationships. Older people want to reap their laurels, whether retirement or the acknowledgement of others for their achievements and old people just want to live a bit longer in reasonably good health. The winner isn't the one with the most toys. That is at an earlier stage of existence. Towards the end, the winner is the one most extended.
The principles applied to walking also apply to the ordinary and exalted aims of life. People put up benchmarks for progress and they can subdivide the measurements. You are satisfied for having accomplished a bachelor’s degree in six rather than four years-- or think you beat the game by managing it in three. You break up your mortgage into thirty yearly installments. You have another year of conjugal tranquility. And people can even alter the length of travel itself as when a person decides not to walk two miles but only one. Your goal is a Chevy rather than a luxury car. You decide to settle on middle management rather than the stress of greater accomplishment. When I told a set of students that professions required sacrifices and stress so as to achieve their positions, they asked why bother to do so rather than to settle down with a humdrum and noncompetitive job. It would have been agonizing over just losing out in an Olympic foot race after having trained for years or accepting celibacy as the price of becoming a Roman Catholic priest or taking four more years of school and a residency to become a doctor.
Life is a set of accomplishments or failures to accomplish some goal rather than a degree of accomplishment as would be the case if you could partly type or make a phone call or get a date. You either do or don’t. That view of life is very different from thinking people obey customs or duty or only follow a single imperative, as when Goffman thought the sole goal in life was to maintain appearances. I note that all of these matters are external rather than arising from the self. Instead, life consists of tasks which at the end of the day are satisfying because a person has accomplished some number of them, such as writing a few paragraphs or making some phone calls or getting the groceries or capturing some moments of calm amidst the bustle of childrearing. A personal identity has to do with accomplishing those activities that seem to you important and being old can mean chewing without pain.
A consequence of this point of view about human nature is that the philosophical notion of free will can be reduced from a metaphysical matter into choices having to do with real activities, two of which will be cited. Liebnitz thought it imponderable how an ass could decide how to choose between two bales of hay equally distant and equal in all other characteristics. Would the ass starve for indecision? Liebnitz thought not because there is always an external asymmetry. But my explanation is internal. People and asses can find an excuse to decide so as to eat and no longer be hungry. You can decide the first bale you noticed was the best one or that one bale was discolored even though it was not. You want to eat something, after all. Similarly, you decide what movie to go to because you want to see one even if all of them are unappealing by choosing some arbitrary factor, like maybe you heard of the costar. Excuses are real because choices are real. There is nothing metaphysical, only arbitrary in thinking a hundred yard dash is not a hundred ten yards long. Second, people can examine how to segment and restrain their mental measurements of accomplishment so my walk has seven of two segments and no time pressure. An ass can eat at leisure unless someone is coming down on the animal. People think of free will as not just the goals they have but how to apportion them,partial numbers mostly still rational, a page a satisfactory advance in writing, or a good word or good deed reminding you you were a good person that day. The mind can do all kinds of things. That is called thinking, which is another name for free will.