"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understand the art of walking" -Henry David Thoreau
I ran across this article, The Fine Art of Walking, written by Dionne Lapointe-Bakota in Taproot, the magazine for makers, doers and dreamers (Issue 19 if you want to enjoy). Sounds lovely just reading the titles. The authors words set in and came back to me days after I had read them. There is something interesting to think about our lives as these series of fast moving events, leaving one to get to the other, hardly a moment for self-thought in between. How often do we take time to breathe, to think about what we know, or to dream about what we want to grow into and how we want to become? How often do we take the time to walk through our lives looking, listening, finding something anew?
A few years ago, as I was building the first (and very modest) version of Consumption Literacy Projects website, the words The Art of Questioning flowed out. I wrote them on the homepage as a guide to remember that this is what we must come back to. We have to walk, not run, to slowly sift through what we know. A good question is an insightful and meaningful proposition that comes from a walking pace and focused reflection. In fact, I might argue that when we teach about consumption literacy, a form self-literacy about how we each interact with the rest of the world, we must walk through a process of learning to think differently. We are learning to become citizen scientists with each of our daily steps. We are scientists, not because we have learned a fact but by virtue of our process of thinking. The process to observe, to reflect, and to question what we have heard or adopted as a personal belief, and then experiment with ways to shift our habits…to dream about what could change in our daily lives to make the world more beautiful. My dream is that with every step, with every breathe, with every thought, with every beautiful question something powerful is released back out into this changing world.
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