A day in full

Craig Mod has maybe a different idea from the rest of us about what constitutes a “full” day. To him, it basically means putting in the miles. On foot. All. Day. Long.

Mod is Homo Ambulans: Walking Man. A human defined by, and increasingly well known for, the epic strolls he takes and writes about exquisitely.

He’s an American who has been living in Japan for 25 years, and that’s where much of his best stuff is set. Mod has done for the Shikoku Pilgrimage Trail what Paulo Coelho did for the Camino de Santiago.

Here he is recently, reflecting on his recent 220-km walk through the Kiso Valley between two mountains in Nagano – seven Big Days strung on a line like pearls.

“Mid-walk, entering the zone, on day seven, I arrived to Karuizawa in a state of extreme beatificity … amplified with a fullness inaccessible in the ‘normal’ day-to-day.“

To Mod’s mind, this is why a day spent on foot feels so good, so “full”: we’re wired for it.

“I suspect we’re ‘programmed’ to feel good about this, and this is, fundamentally, how we emerged from the muck, how we walked out of Africa, how we engineered the miraculous (and horrific) bits of modern humanity. Fullness feels good because DNA knows that fullness pushes us ever ‘forward.'”

What we are NOT wired for? Being online. Mod appreciates this maybe most about a full day of walking: it keeps him off his smartphone.

“I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest,” after having even part of a day ensnared in those algorithms, he says. Consuming media diets that are “mostly garbage.”

Whatever space you had in your mind, smartphones steal. The walks are the antidote. “They are “space-generation machines,” Mod says, “full-bodied reminders of what fullness is and how it can manifest.

“I regret zero seconds of those walks. I regret almost every second spent on Instagram.”

To seize back that time and space, that is what “owning your days” is all about. And how we own our days is how we own our life, as Annie Dillard almost said.

There’s a group of Gen Z kids from Toronto who would surely agree, and for the same reasons. They call themselves The Walkers.

Friends since high school, and now college students in their twenties, they routinely meet for urban walks that can last between eight and twelve hours. They often start downtown and vector outward until the CN Tower is so tiny in the distance they can pinch it between thumb and forefinger. (Shades of this guy)

The idea came to them during the pandemic. Like all kids, suddenly marooned at home, they faced a kind of Hercules Choice: they could pick the path of hedonism or the path of hardiness. They could lose themselves in gaming and doomscrolling online, or they could lose themselves in the outdoors. The second option seemed to offer longer-lasting payoffs. So they bubbled up and rode out the pandemic together, on the hoof.

“These walks embody the values of kids – we’re discovering, exploring,” said 22-year-old Sebastian, who emerges as the philosopher. He’s into psychogeography, a discipline that studies how our environment affects our emotions and behaviour. (The word was coined by Sixties avant-garde scalliwag Guy DeBord, who had strong feelings about how humans ought to move through life: we should … drift.)

But here’s the difference between Mod and the Walkers. The Walkers identify as a collective – that’s actually the point. Out together on the derive, “we’re cementing bonds with each other.” Whereas Mod likes to walk alone. He has decided that, for him, that’s really the only way to achieve the “fullness” he craves. To be fair, Mod’s goals are slightly different. He’s doing his own kind of Coelho-like alchemy: he’s spinning his miles into perceptions, insights, words. He finds himself protecting “the pool of energy” he’ll need later in the day to write. “When even the closest of close friends joins me, that energy pool is quickly depleted.”

Either way, both Mod and the Walkers are clearly on to something. Great minds throughout history agree:

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk,” said Soren Kierkegaard. “Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”

That is how you live all of a day. And feel full at the end of it.

“Aim for fullness if you want happiness,” says Mod. “If the creator itself came down from the sky at the end of a big walking and photographing and writing day and asked: Did ya do all ya could today? I’d be able to answer, without hesitation, Heck yes.”