Connecting by walking

In the global debate on longevity, lifestyle is often celebrated as one of its main pillars: guidelines, charts, numbers. Counting steps. Timing minutes. Burning calories. Lifting weights without a goal. Moving just to “stay fit.”

And yet, in this medicalized and standardized version, movement loses what matters most: meaning. It becomes an empty gesture, stripped of roots, reduced to a metabolic function.

In the stories I gathered in Sardinia – especially among the shepherds and farmers of Barbagia and Ogliastra – another perspective emerges with clarity: here, movement has never been an end in itself.

To move means to enter into relationship with the environment. It means responding to an ecological logic that connects humans with animals, with the wind, the springs, the cycles of the seasons.

​

The shepherd’s step is not an exercise, but an act of knowledge. One walks to follow the goats, to find new herbs, to read the sky. Every gesture is filled with necessity, with listening, with sense. There is no mechanicity, but rather interdependence.

Traditional movement, unlike its urban and standardized counterpart, is adaptive and harmonious. Muscle fibers, balance, even the rhythm of breathing adjust to the ruggedness of the terrain, to altitude, to climatic variations.

The landscape is not a backdrop, but a co-agent: shaping, orienting, teaching.

Tim Ingold (Being alive, 2011) would say it this way: the body in movement does not simply execute, it generates. It acts, it knows, it orients itself. Every step is world-making.

​

Walking along the mountain paths, following the rhythm of the herds or the inclination of the wind, the body tunes into the landscape. It doesn’t merely observe it: it lives it, internalizes it. This is what phenomenology and performance studies describe as kinaesthetic empathy (Sklar, 1994): the body’s ability to sense and understand the movement of the other – human or non-human – through a process of resonance.

​

This – far more than any step counter – is the movement that makes us live long. Not the sterile repetition of empty patterns, but the action that arises from a goal, from necessity, from a living relationship.

It is the movement that connects, that roots, that generates longevity as an embodied experience.

This was captured beautifully in the documentary Climbing the Elixir by Monica Dovarch, visual anthropologist, presented at the IV edition of the Longevity Fest in Porto Cervo last August. In those images, the abyssal difference between the “empty” movements of gyms and the full, situated, relational movements of the shepherds becomes clear. And there lies the secret: longevity is born exactly this way – from the meaning that inhabits our gestures.