Descalzo Lessons for a Digital World

What barefoot walking can teach us about the appropriate use of technology

Aug 19, 2024

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Five summers ago, I was still a relatively new convert to catholicism and was ardently seeking my vocation in prayer and kept returning to the impulse or inspiration that I would be a wandering preacher in Europe. At the time, I thought I should start experimenting with barefoot walking as a preparation for this task. Of course barefoot would be a more excellent way to fulfill this task. So one evening rather than throw on my summer sandals to walk to my local grocery in Hyde Park, I decided to try the 2km walk barefoot. It didn´t go well. By then end of the walk, the muscles in my feet were aching, the bottoms of my feet were very tender and not happy to have been exposed to the ground, and my heels, worst of all, were badly bruised. “How do people do this?” I wondered. But I kept going and havent stopped really. Each subsequent year I find I am able to do a little more, and am able to puch my limits a little further. And I´ve been pleasantly surprised by what barefoot walking has taught me. If barefoot walking doesn´t have any obvious connection to our digital world, as the digital revolution really hasn´t altered this aspect of our life materially, I do think barefoot living might provide the most ready-to-hand lessons for the appropriate use of technology in general.

An ulterior motive for barefoot training was that I´ve always enjoyed running and wished to develop a toe-strike for long distance running. I knew barefoot running would more or less insist upon this. After my bruised heels recovered, I started walking exclusively barefoot, a shock to the locals in Hyde Park and a few friends of mine. I moved my barefoot running training from the beach to the park, and from the park to the street. And on the street I realized the same joy I found running on my toes as I ran sprints in high school. I was gliding again and it felt great. I was taking small quick steps like a bird, and this time I was flying not just for 400m but for miles and miles as my calves slowly developed to do a long distance toe strike. I loved the form that was given. I loved nature´s form.

But the flip side of this is that, if nature gives the form, its still a hard teacher. I needed the balls of my feet to strike the pavement carrying along with them the vast portion of my body weight, with my heels then gently coming to rest and then bouncing off the same surface and then finally my the balls of my feet and toes again springing forward without wiggle, with perfect symmetry. Anything less than this and the skin under my feet couldn´t survive. Too much friction would cause blisters. The quickest way to learn to run well is to run barefoot. In my case, to be honest, nature also needed the help of a fair number of instructional youtube videos before I could approximate the correct form.

Fast forward to a year after my start with barefoot running, I was still running the barefoot living experiment, and had started a few new experiments. I had quit my job in chicago, moved to germany, and was living in the forest. A pilgrim walking to Santiago from northern germany showed up at the evening Mass in the Freiburger Münster on the vigil of the Assumption. He needed a place to stay. I offered him a place sleeping next to me in my tent in the black forest and he was pleased to take me up on this offer. Then next day he invited me to walk with him to Santiago and I, pleased at the thought of accompanying him and at least the reality of it for the first 4 km or so, took him up on the offer. But even that first day where we couldn´t have gone much more than 20km in total was an absolute nightmare. My feet were killing me. The muscles in my feet were too weak and found themselves throbbing at the end of the day. After two days of walking I took a train back to Freiburg with my tail between my legs. But two months later I set out again and this time did eventually arrive months later in Santiago and then Fatima Portugal. I started and ended without shoes or sandals but I did (full disclosure) do a majority of this pilgrimage shod. Injury, cold, cowardice, psychic survival, all played a role in my preference for shoes at times and still do. I say this not to give a false impression. I am not (yet) a purist. I am a pragmatist who sees immense benefits in barefoot walking.

But basically, the stuff of barefoot walking is basically more sensory imput overall, more pleasure, and much, much more pain. When I first started barefoot walking I thought I would eventually develop callouses under my feet that would eventually return the walking experience to the same level of comfort as shod running and walking. This never happened. I did develop thicker callouses on the soles of my feet, but these only serve to allay, not entirely alleviate the pain. If you run a marathon barefoot, even if you manage to find a marathon totally without gravel, you will have a few very painful strikes where the balls of your feet land directly on a sizeable rock. If you walk barefoot on the camino de santaigo, there will be some very uncomfortable gravel stretches. Pain becomes an accepted part of barefoot life. And patience is basically our muscle for tolerating discomfort, pain, failure, in pursuit of a distant goal. And barefoot running and walking insists upon exercising your patience muscle, it insists upon accepting and dealing with pain, rather than seeking to avoid it. One also learns how subjective pain is. I can happily romp down a gravel path with a good conversation partner, but alone I would timidly tip-toe and be on the verge of tears. Pain tolerance is all about focus and focus is about community.

If nature provides the form and the form is often hard and painful, patience lets nature also adapt quickly and well to the proper form. The feet themselves grow to become like bricks of muscle, built to feast upon the earth, upon earthen paths, pavement, parking lots, rocks, whatever. My feet became conquerers. In retrospect its sometimes humorous to see ripped men in gyms who look like they could lift cars yet whose feet are so weak they couldn´t endure a 5km walk in the park without injury. Few parables could sum up our contemporary world so succinctly, we have become incomparably strong in many aspects of life, but with consideration of the most essential point of contact with the ground, or at the metaphorical level with reality itself, we have become altogether limpid and almost ill-equiped to endure the slightest discomfort or confrontation without technological mediation or assistance. Having strong feet, having human paws, feels great and I´ve grown to love exercising them.

I tend disdain the entirety of the new-agey lexicon, words like the word energy, chakra, spiritual pathways, connectedness, authenticity, living in the present, etc. But after years of walking barefoot, I have to admit the people who talk about “grounding“ are onto something. There is a sort of intangible spiritual benefit to having the skin of your feet make contact with the ground as the theory of grounding goes. The theory seems intuitive: both our hands and feet are chalk full of nerve endings and it seems, at the very least like letting these nerve endings get their daily exercise or activity without incumberance must have some cognitive benefit, moreover going barefoot does facilitate a deeper awareness of and connection to ones physical environment.

Another way to frame this connection is that barefoot walking is just way more mentally intense. When I am walking on the camino and I put sandals on, I notice that I am then allowed to check out mentally and be way less attentive of my surroundings. Sometimes this feels like a relief. With shoes I can let my thoughts wander more freely but its a slothful sort of state overall. Truly, I´ve found that prayer, philosophical speculation, insight into my life, these things are more ready to hand when I am walking barefoot. The whole impetus behind barefoot walking in the middle ages was penance. Here offering the pain itself became part of the intention. Im ashamed to say how little of this I´ve done when I am walking. But the few times I have said, “Lord, I offer up this path for x good thing, the repose of the soul of X, or X persons discernment right now,“ I am always granted graces to pray better for this person during that period of time.

Thus, after one develops the skill and learns to harness this added level of experience and intensity, shod pilgrims can seem like neanderthals in contrast, as they can trod along without considering their step, like thoughtness brutes insensible to pain, crunching rocks beneath their boots, where I am more or less doing pirouettes around the same rocks to prance along with a minimum of pain. I dance on a stage that others cannot see, as every rock, mud puddle, possible thorn, has a different meaning for me. I keep walking barefoot because I find this dance to be more beautiful and rewarding all-together. Except when its not, when its too much pain, when I am miserable, when I am injured, when I have to focus so hard I cannot converse, when I can´t keep up with people I really want to keep walking with. Then I put on sandals! I am not a purist but a pragmatist.

If pressed on the matter, I think my experiment with barefoot living has taught me the following things that could be applied more broadly concerning technology and our dependence on digital technology:

We should try as best as we can to let nature alone teach us the proper form for things and make experiments in this regard.
Doing so won´t make life easier, but more intense and rich, likely much more difficult and painful at times.
It will require a great deal of patience, failure, and adaptation.
This adaptation will ultimately strenthen us at crucial points of contact with ourselves, others and with the world.
Nature´s intention is a greater unity with creation, a greater intensity of life, and overall more beauty. It will teach us to dance in the most surprising ways and in the most precarious moments.

At the end of my first camino, as I arrived in Finisterra I hopped in the sea and then I wondered how to celebrate. I was all alone. But above all I thought a dance with my guardian angel was in order, and commenced a jig with him. I had been granted so many graces to keep on going over the previous months. There were even times when I resolved to stop with my thumb out to hitchnike home. I was always somehow stopped from succeeding in these attempts. But really each day walking barefoot, you are so vulnerable. In this way too, barefoot walking proves to be an accurate metaphor for life itself. No matter how strong your feet become, one shard of glass can end a pilgrimage, one mistep could lead to a bad injury. So too one mortal sin. Seeing and accepting this vulerability too is a grace. Grace perfects nature and this vulnerability should turn us to God for protection and guidance, or in the case of walking barefoot, I think it should lead to a special devotion to one´s guardian angel who helps us see the dangers lying before us on our path. And helps us avoid those we never see.

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