Craig Mod’s Rules for walking

 Craig Mod sets up rules for his multi day walks  the walks are also related to a project - a daily newsletter, a book published at the end…

Sometimes he just lists the rules  for example

• 
  
• Walk whenever possible
• Which means: Avoid transportation unless absolutely necessary
  • A lot of interesting things happens in the interstitial “boring” areas between “good” and “suboptimal” walking spaces, and these spaces are often “fast-forwarded” via transportation
• No mental “teleporting:”
• No podcasts
• No social media
• No news sites
• Yes to many things:
  • Yes to being “present” (you know: there, aware, conversant)
  • Yes to entering as many funky looking cafes, diners, barbershops as possible
  • Yes to chatting up elderly farmers galore
• With an almost religious fervency, perform the following creative acts every single day:
• Take a portrait of someone before ten a.m.
• Film five minutes of “nothing exciting” happening somewhere along the road
• Record a five minute binaural audio snippet
• Publish a newsletter
• 
  

My rules for the walk were:

1. No general media (newspapers, articles, podcasts)
2. No social media (Twitter, Instagram)
3. Consolidate data every day (walk notes, photos, GPS data, audio)
4. Push an SMS message out every night (for the first 25 days)
5. Record and publish ~15 mins of audio each day
6. Shoot a portrait before 10am

He glosses this in ridge lines 134

I went on my first “big” walk — that is, a walk longer than ten days — in 2019. Until then I had had no rules. But for that walk, based on work I had done at writing fellowships and retreats, and recognizing the absolute power of disconnecting from the internet, I began to “play” with various walking rules. That first big, disconnected walk was a revelation. Everything since has built atop that experience. Layers of rules, added and peeled away.

I particularly dig the media creation rules — the forcing of my hand each day to make something, to look more closely and closer still at the sometimes nothingness of it all, record that so-called nothingness, and push it out into the world. A farmer’s face. The silent sea between Hokkaido and Honshu. A drunken fisherman psyched about squid. Like little ablutions

He creates “cornerstone activities”

photography will be a cornerstone activity. As will be Ridgeline and Roden (and On Margins) dispatches from the field.

Early in one of his newsletters he hatches the idea of the long walk and sets up guiding rules

He will send out a daily photo each day: 

I see this as a forcing function embedded within the rhythm of the day. I arrive at the inn. Am forced to collate the day’s images. Cull. Cut. Pick one. Push it out. But push it out to a system that doesn’t pull: sms. Unadorned. No stream. No stories. 

He will send out a daily audio recording:

I’m also measuring in sound. Fifteen minutes of audio a day, every day, recorded at 9:45 am. Wherever I may be. I stop, move to the side of the path or road, and then hit record on my binaural mics. The audio is then uploaded in the evening.