Eyes open, feet on the ground

Notes on the pleasures and perils of walking as a woman

Walking, for me, has not always been pleasurable. I often did it with fear and hypervigilance, and only as a necessary way of getting from point A to point B. As a young, sheltered girl in Manila, I grew up surrounded by stories of danger: my high school teacher whose bag was skillfully slashed off her shoulder by men who drove by on a motorcycle, the countless girls taken in the night I hear about on the news, pedestrians caught in fatal accidents because of careless drivers and inexistent urban planning, my brother who, on a short walk home from a restaurant, was beaten bloody by robbers who wanted his wallet and phone. Until high school, I had the privilege of being driven to and from school, and it was within this bubble that I was kept, for a while, safe. It also meant I knew nothing of what it meant to be outside until, one day, I had to be.

Inevitably, sadly, as though part of a cruel initiation into womanhood, I accumulated my own stories. On a walk home one night, on a sidewalk along a major thoroughfare, a man rolled his windows down and offered to give me a ride. He drove at my walking pace for a few minutes, insisting that I get in, even after I had politely declined. Another time, while riding the jeep home, a man refused to stop touching my side even as I shook him off that I had to get off the vehicle before I had even arrived at my stop, trembling as I walked the rest of the way to my destination. (Yes, I said nothing. It takes practice to not say nothing.) I’ve had my wrist grabbed by someone who demanded I give them my number. Catcalls that ranged from stupid to threatening were common, which led to the habit of blasting music during commutes so as to not hear them—a coping mechanism that, I recognize, poses its own hazards. (Alas, much of a woman’s life is a series of similar calculated risks.) These stories are not unique to me.

I eventually caught on that walking isn’t just putting one foot in front of the other. Far from simply being a passive mode of transportation, walking is a way of being in the world. When I walk, bearing only my bag and the clothes on my back, I dissolve whatever barrier there is between myself and everything else. It is an inherently vulnerable act, and being vulnerable takes practice and preparation. Out there, I am seen. With the prevalence of surveillance and everyday documentation, I am also likely caught on photographs and videos I may never know about. When I am walking, I can become the target of a solicitation, a random compliment, one of a hundred forms of violence, a romantic proposition, bird droppings—or, most commonly, nothing. Out there, I become part of the breathing, living crowd that animates the city with its garbage and chatter. Its greasy fingerprints and shed skin. Its hustle and hurry. Its clever beauty.

To walk is to steep in context. The facts of my subjectivity—a relatively small, dark-haired, young Filipino woman—brush up against the ever-shifting reality of the world I move in. For a girl in many places, this friction is often particularly cruel. It has been for a very long time. The world may change, and I like to think I actively contribute to its hopeful trajectory in my own way, but progress is slow and I need to live today. I need to come to terms with my vulnerability as a precursor to life, and not its hurdle. I want to walk better, which is to say, I want to learn how to better meet the world as it is. To get there, the fear shadowing me needs to be exorcised.

This metaphorical exorcism is mostly an exercise in trust: in my feet’s ability to take me where I want to go, and my mind’s capacity to handle whatever I encounter along the way. My proper education, in walking and many other matters in life, really began in college. It was in UP Diliman that I learned what it meant to walk. It was, first and foremost, inevitable. Back-to-back classes were spread across different buildings throughout the nearly 500 hectare campus which meant my daily schedule always included a trek. As a freshman, I lost my way around so often that the only way I learned the campus geography was to keep walking until I saw a familiar monument that helped me flesh out my mental map or, at desperate moments, a friendly-faced stranger to ask for directions. Trusting that, regardless of detours, I can always find my way back was fundamental. Everything else—the courage to ask questions, the curiosity to observe and investigate, the instinct for danger, intuitive spatial awareness—followed suit.

Sketch of the Sunken Garden, University of the Philippines Diliman, 2016

Once I familiarized myself with the terrain and had a better grip on my anxiety, I began to see the little wonders of the campus that would have always been hidden from me had I never walked. The feeling of walking under a canopy of acacia trees is remarkable, of course, but so too are the roots breaking through the cement of the sidewalks as if in rebellion, the small ponds along shortcuts between college buildings that make every day a hike, the way the branches look like a network of rivers against a burning twilight sky when I am walking with a friend, the ache and community of marching in protest. I had come to find a power in my legs.

Every place invites you to walk differently, and in walking different terrains I’ve gained access to new ways of thinking—and thus, being. The more I walked, the more I understood how to read the people through their place. The logic of the city, its layout, its layers of architecture, and the way it steers its people, is always a complex lesson on history and human values. Just by walking a city I learn something about its soul. Manila is cutthroat, and I can tell by the way its people are forced to fight for space on the diminishing public transportation, or the obvious corruption in expensive, horribly-made infrastructure. I see it in the assault against human health by cockroach-infested streets and the palpable smog of apocalyptic traffic. But there is also a distinct creativity of survival everywhere I look: old tarpaulin banners repurposed as store awnings, cut-up plastic bottles as decor, beer crates as makeshift stools. There is, despite it all, a generosity of love, which I’ve seen in the way security guards care for stray animals around the building they work at, or our penchant for sharing food with family, officemates, or strangers, even when we have little ourselves, even on the most common of days. Manhattan has a similar, brisk pulse that is as generative as it is destructive, while Tokyo’s obvious emphasis on efficiency and functionality is punctuated by bursts of color and personality unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been to.

In the old town of Ljubljana is a spirit of leisure and soft openness. I say that not only because tourists do congregate in that area, but also because of the mere fact of its walkability. During my stay, I walked different routes through the same streets and found something new and intriguing every time. A sculpture I overlooked, a new, eye-catching storefront, heartwarming displays of friendship, pop-up markets. I felt it, too, in the air of the waiters and shopkeepers I’ve encountered, all of whom spoke without rush or antipathy. Ljubljana invites wandering, as does the medieval town of Škofja Loka and the alpine city of Kranj, both only half an hour away.

A shattered storefront in Kranj (left), in the residency apartment in Ljubljana, heading out for Trieste (right)

Texas cities, with their car-centric, pedestrian-hostile sprawl, are the opposite. Here, I travel in the safety of the bubble of my vehicle that brings me from one place to another without having to be in contact with anyone else. In this daily movement, there is little space for surprise beyond what I can see through the windows of my car. This, naturally, leads to a very different worldview.

If you walk long enough, you develop a sixth sense for a city’s energy. Without knowing the place, I can now tell by the air that I’ve somehow crossed a threshold, even before I am really within it. The clues reveal themselves in many ways: the presence or quality of the sidewalks, the state of the facades, whether there is the sound of birds or kids running around. When I wander as a tourist, I depend on this sense to map out my route and seek interesting sights. To my left, the street is quiet, shrouded in a veil of privacy. It likely leads to a residential area. To the right is an invisible buzz, a thrum. I’ll go that way.

Scenes from Zagreb

Wandering on foot is a kind of thinking. When I hit a wall with my writing, a short walk around the ranch—despite the discomfort, as I am unfortunately one of those people mosquitoes seem to find irresistible—never fails to give me a new perspective. In fact, I am convinced that the work I had accomplished during my residency in Ljubljana was fueled by the hours I spent walking aimlessly. Those “unproductive” hours were, in fact, filled with stimulation. While walking in the middle of nowhere requires a wildly different disposition from walking bustling city streets, both nevertheless exercise my muscles of fascination. In both spaces there is danger, whether from black widows or pickpockets or extreme weather conditions, but there is also so much wonder. Everything I’ve seen in my walks has lit up new mental, emotional, and spiritual pathways that have taught me so much about myself, the world, and how to be in it—which is to say, how to be alive. I am grateful to have the chance to do it.