An alternative approach to being outdoors

On 29 September 2023 Open Gates Outdoors led a walk as part of the World Wide Wander organised by Street Wisdom. Street Wisdom describes itself as an international social venture which brings experiential learning to city streets the world over. It was founded by David Pearl with the aim of transforming city streets into inspirational learning zones. 

Street Wisdom attracts me in part because its mission aligns very much with that of Open Gates Outdoors in three ways. First it aims to support people to use the outdoors to improve their wellbeing, in particular those to whom it might not naturally appeal. Second it aims to provide outdoor experiences to these groups for free, funded by the proceeds of providing beneficial outdoor services to corporates for a commercial rate. Thirdly, like Open Gates Outdoors, Street Wisdom appreciates the value of walking in an urban setting as much, perhaps even more than, walking in a rural setting.

However Street Wisdom also fascinates me because of how its approach to walking has challenged my natural approach to guided walking. Unless I am providing outdoor life coaching which has a different end goal, when I am guiding people in the outdoors the end is usually to reach a certain point, to climb a certain hill or to see a certain landmark. In other words very often in the outdoors I, and I suspect most people, are focused on being purposeful. The ethos of Street Wisdom however is to be purposeless.

Street Wisdom encourages us to use walking as method of resolving challenges we face or deciding on a course of action by noticing, interpreting and playing with things we see while wandering. Street Wisdom argues that to do this effectively we have to concentrate on where we are rather than where we are going. In his book Wanderful (2020, Unbound) David Pearl urges us to slow right down and be led by our bodies rather than our minds while walking; to use our minds to notice, interpret and play with things we see while or bodies do the navigating.

To give an example of this approach in practice, on the World Wide Wander I used a standardised measure in Sheffield Peace Gardens (a device for allowing people to measure distances of feet, chains, poles and perches) and a display urging me to "gi oer thi sen" (Sheffield dialect for stop kidding yourself) to resolve a difficulty I was experiencing with parenting one of my daughters!

Street Wisdom's approach to walking will forever give me an alternative way to improve my wellbeing in the outdoors. Street Wisdom's approach is supported by the poem by Andrew Motion in the above photo. Not only did I notice and take time to interpret this poem on the side of the Sheffield Hallam University's Owen Building, which in itself I took as an encouraging sign that I have adopted the Street Wisdom approach, but I think the poem itself is consistent with being purposeless while wandering. It makes no reference to the destination of the wanderer. Instead it urges us to "wander through labyrinths of air". It refers to the reader's surroundings as "priming-places" lifting us "to speculate". It encourages us to use our thoughts to "understand...the lives which wait unseen as yet, unread". Motion very much explores the value and significance of the journey itself rather than its destination.

Try it and post a comment on how you got on......