I study what is called “affordance” in ecological psychology: the question of what a person or animal’s surroundings (environs) furnish or “afford” it. Imagine a woman with a severe visual impairment who cannot perceive light is walking along the wall of an underground passage at a train station. She begins to hear where the wall cuts away, detects a change in air pressure on her face—these “landmarks” allow her to move fluently through the passage. She can tell when to adjust her tack by changes in the flow of air and the orientation of the sounds commingling around her. While she walks, she is engaging a whole range of subtle environmental textures that we ordinarily overlook. Her system of navigation is holistic, taking into account the way her own noises echo around her and the tactile sensations in her feet. This is true even when vision is involved. We all rely on multi-sensory cues.

I once followed a man who was completely blind as he walked around the east exit of Shinjuku Station. He oriented himself by the rumble of trains coming into the station north-south on the JR line, following the smell of leather from shoe shops on either side of a back street toward the waft of a ramen joint up ahead, allowing a flux of ambient sounds to guide him along. Through a combination of loud train noises and subtle intimations, he managed to maintain a firm grasp on where he was. Navigation, it seems, is based on information garnered from one’s local milieu as much as global landmarks.

We ordinarily go about the business of locomotion under the assumption that we are in control of ourselves. One decides where one wants to go, how one will get there. But having observed how people with visual disabilities navigate their surroundings through careful attention to peripheral information, I’ve come to realize that movement is only possible because of the varying and complex nature of roads and their environs. Our surroundings afford us movement. The joy we experience in walking, I’ve begun to understand, is the discovery and appreciation of this ambient information.

Some runners rely largely on visual cues, while others find it onerous to look off into the distance, preferring to take in the texture of the ground before them. But the experience can never be limited to the visual, the auditory, or the tactile. Information is multi-sensory. When we decide that we like a certain road, or that a particular path “feels good,” we are culling this distinction from a melange of information. Our sense of vision, of sound, of touch, of air pressure and olfactory textures, the firmness or softness of our own bodies and the flow of light and wind around them—these factors ultimately constitute the joy that we experience in running.

I like hills—sometimes I’ll take a detour onto a hilly street without knowing where it leads. I like narrow little lanes. I head into a little backstreet knowing that it might be a dead end, following it along only to find it suddenly opening up, at the last moment, upon a vista. This wonderful sensation of crossing a threshold is directly related to the pleasure of walking. Movement comes from the desire to reveal the concealed, to glimpse that which is just out of view. This is perhaps one of the strongest life-drives in all animals.

One sometimes gets lost, on a walk. And then one regains one’s bearings. This is enjoyable. People with visual impairments find themselves getting lost quite often. But they never lose their cool; they don’t make a scene; they instead stand still and take stock of their surroundings: okay, I see, that’s over there, so I’m here. For them, this process of losing and regaining one’s bearings is something from which pleasure is derived.

The question of “who am I?” is largely a question of where one is. One’s sense of place is the basis for one’s identity. This is why moving to a far away place implies a change in self. One’s sense of place involves all the peripheral information of its locality. And so one makes a point of taking roads one has never taken before. The discovery of unknown topography, light, noise, and tactility implies the discovery of a new self. And isn’t this, after all, the true joy of running?

Running and walking, then, are our way of rediscovering on a daily basis that we are here, alive, in the world.