Ekelund Torbjorn: Istorija staza: pešačenje kroz vreme i prirodu

Torbjorn Ekelund: The history of trails: hiking through time and nature

I walked and wrote, walked and wrote, and the more I walked and the more I wrote, the clearer it became to me that the story of the trails cannot be told without telling the story of people as walking beings and the landscape that surrounds them. The path and the landscape are inextricably linked. The same applies to people. We understand ourselves in relation to the landscape in which we were born; it sets the framework for our life more than anything else. While moving through a landscape, we feel as if we are doing something primal. We move as we are given to move. Pace allows us to look around us, absorb the world, see how it slowly changes, hear sounds, feel smells, wind, sun and rain on our faces and the earth under our feet, which changes as we walk on it.
Paths are stories about people walking. They have their beginning, middle and end. They point forward to the destination of the journey, but also back, to all those who walked the path before us and those who left the first traces. The history of trails is the history of us: it is a myriad of stories about work and survival, the need for research and migration, it is a network woven around the earth like threads in a ball of yarn. […]
The track is a perfect metaphor. It contains all the feelings and all the longings of the world. Doubt and faith, birth and death, thoughts, hopes, the road to salvation, the road to destruction, the road to the unknown, a journey from beginning to end. The path is the embodiment of life, at least as it exists in our Christian cultural heritage, in which life is a journey from birth to death, just as the history of mankind is a journey from creation to judgment day.

Walking and movement are not only important because they lower, for example, the level of cholesterol in the blood and thus prevent the development of arteriosclerosis, which complicates and finally stops the work of the heart. For the Norwegian writer Torbjorn Ekelund, hiking and movement are an exciting psychosomatic experience in which our relationship to the environment, nature and our own body is dynamized, complicated and enriched. The history of trails is a story about movement and navigation in space, about migration and shortcuts, about the importance of the landscape for our lives, about our inherited need for movement. These are all precious and almost forgotten aspects of walking and movement in the time we live in, where almost everyone sits in offices, drives cars and navigates using GPS.