Issue link: https://nest.uberflip.com/i/1391738
she needed to be in motion to get words flowing on the page too, and walking did the trick: Tippett: "This pleasure of walking and writing and, I don't know, standing with your notebook and actually writing while you're walking [laughs]" Oliver: "Yes. That's how I did it." Tippett: "…It seems like such a gift that you found that way to be a writer,and to have that daily—have a ritual of writing." Oliver: "Well, as I say, I don't like buildings. The only record I broke in school was truancy. I went to the woods a lot with books. Whitman in the knapsack. But I also liked motion. So I just began with these little notebooks and scribbled things as they came to me and then worked them into poems later." Conclusion: Walking as a long-term resolution? Looking back on our life, we might narrate it to our friends as a journey on foot stretching across all the high- and low- points we've traversed along the way. At the same time, like any journey, there are always those next steps we need to take, and tough decisions on which directions we should go. Thinking about the whole of our lives as a long walk encompasses a bit more long- term thinking than a simple resolution. But maybe, as the environmental journalist Kate Yoder says, long-term thinking might actually help us become better ancestors. In other words, when we think of all the social and ecological crises enveloping the world today, we might make a 'New Century's Resolution' and visualize the task ahead of us to build a better world as a long walk, or a pilgrimage. As the journalist and novelist Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) suggests, if we are concerned about the state of the world, and want to improve it, we might well imagine the task ahead as a responsibility to just keep walking, no matter what: "Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking." – Eduardo Galeano