W hen I moved back to London from Rome just before the second lockdown in , I found a city that was hardly welcoming, with shops closed and an atmosphere of silent apprehension. Young, single people like me were only socialising online with existing friends, and opportunities to make fresh connections were rare. When I met Irenka from Poland at a literary festival, she looked as thirsty for new friends as I was.
As we started complaining about the difficulties of mingling she introduced me to an app that allows people to find new pals on organised walks. I quickly downloaded it. While we were exploring, she explained to me that, since her grandmother had died they had been living together , she had been staying on the sofa of a friend whom she also recently met on a walk.
This friend went to that walk after being encouraged by one of her friends, who also happened to be a Meetup-acquaintance of Irenka. As someone who is much better at slow-cooked friendship that acquires its flavour over time, I was surprised at how trusting Irenka was of strangers and how quick she was to rearrange her life around them. I made more new friends. This kind of thing never happened to me in bars or at parties; those traditional places for socialising. So I started wondering why these walks were so different, and I realised it was to do with the balance between an interpersonal exchange and the outside world.
In bars or clubs you are required to interact with people. Lockdowns made us more aware of the line between self-sufficiency and our need for others, as well as between nesting and exploring the outside world. It probably explains why walking meditation and walking psychotherapy are now so popular, not just in London but in other European and US cities too. It is as if, after we became painfully aware of the claustrophobic distress of having too much of our own company who will forget how our worries were amplified by the four walls of our homes?
But this is nothing new. Europe has a long history of psychogeography , a concept that originated in the s among a Paris-based group of radical artists and conceptual theorists called the Situationist International.
