[GUEST POST] “My shoes are made for walking” by Lynn Borton

We’re big fans of Lynn Borton, the creator and producer of Choose To Be Curious, the award-winning US radio program about how curiosity shows up in our lives. When we discovered that her own curiosity had led her to sketching her walking shoes, we had to find out more!

Sketching is for me another way to “see things differently”, to lean into my curiosity and savor what I’m experiencing as I walk.

In that spirit, I decided to take a travel sketchbook class. We oooh-ed and ahhhh-ed over the instructor’s sketchbooks from the Camino, the cafés of Paris, the markets of Borneo. We learned a bit about layout and color theory. We did a Sketchbook Treasure Hunt: draw something we wear every day, an item from the medicine cabinet, a living thing.

We began to feel the inevitable tug of this travel sketchbook bug….

Our homework on Day Two was to sketch an inventory of our shoes. After the 9/11 attacks in New York and here in Washington DC, I swore I would never be anywhere in shoes I couldn’t walk home in. That sets a certain tone to one’s shoe collection: my shoes are made for walking.

So I leaned into the wander.

I wrote a big bold “WALK” down the side of my page. I made a sketch of some shoes in the middle.

But a contour drawing doesn’t begin to capture the essence of my cherished travel companions. I needed their mark, evidence of their wear. So I inventoried their imprint.

Each pair represents a different kind of walking, a certain seasonality. That seemed worth reflecting as well.

And then there was this awkward blank space at the top of the page – it needed something. I vaguely recalled a topical quote from Emerson but never found it. Instead, I came up with this from Thoreau: “…for every walk is a sort of crusade…”

This is the beauty of sketching: I saw my own shoes — and walking — differently, more fully.

Grab a pen and some paper. What’s the story you want to tell about your walking buddies?

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