A machine for walking

I have rented a machine to do my walking for me.

I can walk, of course, and choose to do so often. Sometimes I walk because my work demands it; that I should go to a particular place at a specified time to discuss some expected (and often unexpected) matters with the expected (and occasionally, unexpected) people. This walking can vary in difficulty and distance, and over the years I am certain that the practice has made me better at it.

On other occasions, I will walk – on purpose – for pleasure. I may choose to walk in the countryside to rekindle a connection to the natural world, reminding myself what a very small collection of biological bits and bobs I am in comparison to everything else around me.

Sometimes I shall amble along an overgrown lane just because I might bump into an unexpected bird or bug that I can add to my catalogue of encounters. More rarely, I will choose to walk up a mountain, picking my way up a massive monolith to the ebbs and flows of geological happenstance across many, many millennia.

I also may choose to walk through the streets and alleys of any cities I am familiar or indeed unfamiliar with. At every turn, in every window, and on most walls and lamp posts, I tend to happen upon the ingredients of a thriving social soup, as locals and tourists alike leave their marks and stickers and products and pronouncements.

Lately, though, these new machines for walking promise that I can leave the mere physical limitations of my own two legs behind – why walk one city, when you might walk them all at once! And so I have rented a machine for walking, for a very reasonable sum, discounted yet further should I subscribe for twelve months.

As the machine walks the world, it notices and and notes all of the things I would have seen, felt, smelt, touched and heard from the environments around them, before returning home to whisper what it finds in my ear. You might argue that the text of this telling is a mere shadow of what it might have meant to walk by myself, but how else am I to get through all of this walking I need to do?

I can never know, of course, but it assures me I’m asking all the right questions about the things I may have seen should I have walked in those places. In fact, so time consuming are my interrogative sessions with my walking machine, that I barely have any time to walk for myself…