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, the idea being 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, explains “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.”
Grand Hotel Mackinac Island — world’s longest porch
Instructions for a saunter
Click here for instructions by WikiHow on how to enjoy a good old-fashioined, Zen-like saunter — how to walk with no other purpose than to enjoy the walk.
How not to saunter
Thoreau
“The Spirit of Sauntering: Thoreau on the Art of Walking and the Perils of a Sedentary Lifestule in Brain Pickings by Maris 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.”
Saunterings in London
A book Saunterings in and about London, first published in 1923, is a available on Amazon.
Cats saunter too
More info:
Every day we walk the dogs in a nearby Conservation Park. We’ve seen it in every condition: heat, cold, blizzard, almost hurricane, ice storm. We practically know every squirrel, chipmunk, deer and turkey by name. And yet we pass other bi-podals with their hand-held devices plugged in, in terror of missing something from the internet. The trilliums may be thriving, Mr. and Mrs. Duck may be waddling down the path, a 300 year old tree may have come down in the last blow, but they cannot just go for a walk