June 19 — [same date every year]
Sauntering: walking along slowly, aimlessly, happily
World Sauntering Day began in 1979 at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan, the hotel with the world’s longest porch — 660 feet long.
W.T. Rabe, the hotel’s public relations director, started the day in response to recent surge in jogging — to encourage people, instead of jogging, to slow down to appreciate what’s all around them.
Explained by founder’s son on NPR
In the NPR article “World Sauntering Day 2014: How to Saunter and History of Holiday,” John Rabe, W.T. Rabe’s son, explained his father’s option to moving fast: “Sauntering is when you don’t care where you’re going, how you’re going, or when you will get there, paying attention to the world around you, smelling the roses.”
Thoreau
“The Spirit of Sauntering: Thoreau on the Art of Walking and the Perils of a Sedentary Lifestule in Brain Pickings by Maria Popova says about Thoreau:
“In his 1861 treatise Walking, penned seven years after Walden, Thoreau sets out to remind us of how that primal act of mobility connects us with our essential wildness, that spring of spiritual vitality methodically dried up by our sedentary civilization.”
Sauntering in London
A book Saunterings in and about London, first published in 1923, is available on Amazon.
Sauntering in Paris
Cats saunter too
Primer for a saunter
Click here to get to a primer by WikiHow on how to enjoy a good old-fashioned, Zen-like saunter — how to walk with no other purpose than to enjoy the walk.
More info:
