We have heard about people who are addicted to drugs, smoking, tea, etc. and I am sure everyone on the planet must be addicted to something. But in my case, my addiction on walking is fairly weird to most people. In this article, I am going to talk about what made me to taking walk daily, and then to talk about three phases of my walking addiction development: the primordial phase, the process phase, and the advanced phase; at last, I will talk about views I have seen in my walking time.

The world is changing drastically as we know, it runs on a high-speed rail, we cannot catch up all the new technologies and knowledge that created and developed by talented people all over the world in the recent decade. For example, in IT(Information Technology) world, there are tons of new technologies and concepts filled up our brains; parallel computing, cloud computing, big data, SaaS, PaaS, VR, AR, AI, the list never goes to end. We always feel disappointed when we derail from the super knowledge train, all of these technologies and terms bursting in our face makes us fools.The world seems peaceful in most parts, we live with our routine. But we feel something is forcing us to a harder situation, it seems more fierce as the time goes. We are more stressful than ever before, and it goes worse. To reduce my stressful feeling, I react to the situation by taking walk. When you build a habit of walking, it will change your lifestyle. And that is why I am addicted to taking walk.

Walking addiction phase one: the primordial

That was in 2014 when I was very young then. Working in an IT company is sometimes boring, you have to sit on your chair all day and staring at your computer screen, that is painful for people who are not coders. But to me, as a coder, it is stressful, too. After a long time coding in the day, I need get out of the building to feel the beats of life. So I decided why not taking walks instead of by bus to get to the place I live and, at the same time, to feel the breath of the city. Finally, I built the habit of walking.

I did not know then, I was just enjoying walking occasionally. Still waters run deep, I never thought taking walks will become my addiction.

Walking addiction phase two: the process

Taking walks is not to waste your time away. On the contrary, taking walks makes you better in physically and mentally.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, taking walks made me healthier. In my earlier years, I was susceptible to illness. But now, I never have a chance to get any ailment. As a programmer, I sat all day in office in working hours and stayed at my place all time on weekends, which was killing me, I easily got a cold and other illness. Taking walks means you got to get outside, you move your whole body, this can avoid muscle degeneration and, to obese people, can lose weight.

More than physical health improvement, walking-thinking is a great way to think out of the box. We are all trapped in an invisible cube, so most of the time we cannot think out of the box. We human beings are complicated, we are afraid of unknown things and we are curious about these things excitedly. Human beings always think in their native culture and knowledge they’ve involved. Thus, we are trapped in our culture and knowledge, to think in a different way is not possible to most of us. I do much thinking every day, think about life, think about culture, think about people, think about science, etc. In the process of thinking, I realized who am I, what I want to do, and how to face up to the losses of life. Somebody once said, qualitative change caused by quantitative change. All the thinkings I did change me as a fighter.

Walking addiction phase three: the advanced

In 2016, near the Spring Festival Eve. I made a two-day leave to get home earlier. When I got to Xiaguan(a modern town of Dali), I walked home at night for 45 kilometers. When I got home, it’s about 2:00 in the morning, I walked almost 7 hours. This experience is really tough. On the road, I did think many things. I thought I just another ordinary person, I am not special at all. Recently, I take two walks a day, which makes me really tired off. Sometimes I went to a supermarket 4 kilometers away from my place, I just want to live in the real world and see things going around. My body to me is just a flesh and blood container, if technology allows me to let my conscious leave my brain and upload it online I will do it.

Change a place you live is to change the view you see the world. In Jack Kerouac’s book On The Road, Sal Paradise is bored with unchanging life in New York, he needs to travel from place to place to experience life outside, and to gain the source of writing. And he did it greatly, he wrote the famous book I mentioned above. When you are walking you change the place of your world at least in a short period of time, your view of the world becomes more diverse, you think different.

There is a scientific study says walking can change human brain’s structure, people who are taking walks can become more creative. I do not know if it is true. In my point of view, walking cleans out messy stuff in my mind, and it can let me wander in the wild world without limitation. I really enjoy it.

What makes walking such an enjoyable pleasure is the views I have seen in my walking time. At any moment the view you see is different. That is interesting, things moving and changing in the time dimension makes the world unpredictable, which gives us not a monotonous feeling but a lively sense of life. The trees on sides of the avenue near my place, sprouting in spring, lush in summer, leaves dropping in fall, lonely in winter; playing a cycle of nature. Watching busy people doing their all sorts of work is a little pleasure to me, and it helps me understand how the society really works in basis - supply and demand. I saw technology solves problems in real world. In the 21st century, the Internet is the main character, it yields products that we cannot imagine decades ago. Bike sharing is an example recently. OfO bikes the yellow ones, and Mobike bikes the red ones are everywhere in cities, you just scan the QR code on the bike, then you can ride it to where you want and, the most important concept, dockless.

Conclusion

Although I do not really know what causes the difference between walking addiction and other addictions, but many of them to walking addiction are poles apart in effect on human beings. I do not feel right if stay in a room all day, like abstinent reaction, my subconscious forces me to escape from the room and to the beauty of nature. Taking walks has become indispensable to me, I need it to nourish myself. So I am a walker so to speak.