How We learn to Walk.

And then forget...

This is my 100th post on Substack, coinciding with a significant, familial, calendrical repetition, or more simply, my good wife Lyn's seventieth birthday. I had been intending to write a piece on things physical for a while and some aspects of Lyn's birthday gave me a further prod, as follows.

For part of the celebration, Lyn elected to take a trip up the road to Porthmadog for a tour of the charity shops (five in all). We returned with a reasonable haul of clothes, some books and a DVD. The following day, both of us were aware of having slightly dodgy backs and brain fatigue. After some discussion, we came up with the following.

Basically, we human beings have not evolved to sit in car seats, walk on hard, unforgiving surfaces like pavements nor sit on concrete steps eating chips (sitting on concrete steps being the crucial thing here, not necessarily the eating of chips). Here were the primary reasons for our physical discomfort the following day. Neither have we evolved to mingle with large numbers of strangers, something which we manage by expending mental energy to control the stress or anxiety this engenders.

For much of our several hundred thousand years as small groups of wanderers and later, in our tribes of around the Dunbar number of members, (about 150 folk), we generally only interacted with a relatively small group of people, all of whom we knew, from birth. Tribal boundaries, when they came into being, could be extremely strict.

Jared Diamond¹ gives an account of what happens when two members of different tribes happen to meet on a boundary and don't know each other; they would immediately sit down and try to establish a connection, working backwards through their various heritages and relationships. If they failed to find a connection, they would then have to chose between either running away or fighting.

Similarly, here in Britain in the time of tribes, usually glossed with the name of Celtic, prior to the appearance of them Romans, the only folk permitted to move freely over tribal boundaries were the Druids, smiths and pedlars. There's also an ancient, formal greeting, encapsulated in the Cymric prose tales of the Mabinogi, suggestive of a boundary encounter, which goes something like, "Hello, what are you called, where do you come from and what is your purpose here?".

above: OK, not actually Porthmadog but you get the idea; lots of strangers.

Compared to our relative isolation in the forest, our afternoon in a busy Porthmadog was buzzing with interactions of many sorts, from the exchanges at the tills of the charity shops, to random conversations with strangers regarding dogs (Porthmadog seems to have a large resident and visiting population) and other subjects along with the pavement dances to avoid bumping into other folk. The result was feeling exhausted the following day!

Back to the physical and the title of this piece. When I was a youngster, I remember a BBC Christmas Lecture for Children. Among other things the presenter offered a description of how we walk and his assistant (another bloke) demonstrated. Basically, he said, we walk by leaning forwards, beginning with the head and to stop ourselves falling over, we move our legs to keep up. As a youngster, this "knowledge", presented by a significant other, i.e. a lecturer on the BBC, seemed entirely believable, so I believed it.

It was only much later, in the early nineteen eighties that I was presented with an alternative view. This came from Mair Tudur, my first, excellent teacher of T'ai Chi. Early in the course, she offered us an exercise in Slow Walking. To do this, she lined us up along one wall of the hall and told us how to walk across to the other wall, as follows.

Begin with your weight equally distributed between right and left feet. Move your weight onto just one leg, say the left. Next, slowly peel the right foot from the floor, heel first, and raise it. Move it forward and still keeping all your weight on your left foot, place the right on the floor, heel first and lower the toes. When the right foot is in full contact with floor, then and only then, move all your weight onto it. Next, slowly peel the left foot from the floor and repeat the whole process.

Mair would walk with us and we had to keep our speed down to hers; she walked very, very, very slowly. After attempting two or three steps we all found ourselves losing balance and falling over; oh, what a surprise! We realised pretty quickly that we didn't really know how to walk. Over the next few months we returned to this exercise repeatedly and gradually learned, or rather re-learned, how to walk. Generally speaking, all the various T'ai Chi forms² teach this way of moving.

So here we were presented with a completely different view of how to walk. Rather than the western method of leading with the head and continuously falling over while moving the legs to catch up, here was a method where we lowered our centre of gravity a touch, never moved our weight until the front foot was securely down, leading with our stomach (or Tan Tien, to be more precise, the centre of the body's mass, a few inches below the belly button). Having seen Akira Kurosawa's film The Seven Samurai between these two events, I had been surprised at how the samurai ran; there was non of the up and down motion of the toppling walk/run, more of a gliding action; now it made complete sense.

above: T’ai Chi postures. Note how the head is up and the back generally vertical with the centre of the body always between the feet, never leaning over them.

Later study and practice of T'ai Chi added in the idea of the golden thread attached to the top of the head and drawing you towards heaven, the feet alone affected by gravity, gluing you to the earth with the body suspended between the two.

Watching my own son begin his first attempts at walking and it became even clearer. He would get to his feet, perhaps with the aid of a chair, turn round and set off, centre of gravity low, head up, back straight, legs bowed and a bit of a waddle. He rarely actually fell over; much more likely was that he would notice his loss of balance and simply sit down, aided in the early stages by a padded nappy; he very rarely hurt himself. It was only when he started running that his head would get out in front and he would lose balance and fall over; oh, the tears!

above: toddler, back straight, head up, arms nicely relaxed, legs slightly bent, ready to sit down rather than topple over.

So we probably all start pretty much this way, that is, as has been taught in various eastern disciplines such as T'ai Chi Chuan and Chi Gung (QiGong) for many centuries. So what happens to us then, that we forget how to walk? Generally in societies where the sense of self becomes over developed and the rights of the individual become more important than those of the tribe and the environment, the seat of consciousness moves upwards to behind the eyes. The individual is now led by the head which is thrust forward. This is particularly noticeable in any confrontation but also in walking.

This toppling over way of walking is what leads to most of the damage from falls as we get older because we do fall over, generally putting our arms out stiffly in an attempt to save ourselves, resulting in broken wrists or forearms. Falling over also means falling hard and heavily, which can mean a broken hip.

By contrast, if we practise the slow walking as taught by Mair, lowering our centre of gravity and never being "off balance", then, like toddlers, we can sink downwards and more slowly collapse into a roll, rather than topple over with a horrible bang at the end of it.

A final thought is that when I practised some Judo, we were taught that if we were thrown onto our backs, to slap the floor hard with our hands and arms, ideally just before our backs make contact. This soaks up some of the energy of the fall. So if we find ourself falling over backwards, rather than sticking our arms down stiffly and taking the hit on our hands, wrists and forearms, with the risk of breaking bones, throw the arms out and back as we go and slap the floor.

All this is worth practising now, beginning on a cushioned surface, rather than waiting for a fall to take us unawares and unprepared. And remember, take the time to move slowly.

Thanks for reading. Any comments always welcome. Safe walking to you all. Hwyl! Chris.

1. Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday; what can we learn from traditional societies? Penguin 2013. I find Jared Diamond an uncommonly clear thinker and several of his books have really helped clarify my thinking, one in particular being “Collapse”.

2. Very roughly, a T'ai Chi form is learned as a sequence of postures and the flow of movement that links the postures together. The form is designed to exercise each major joint in the body in all directions and teach balance and stability, among other things.