Wed 19 June 2019 | 7:00 pm - 11:59 pm
Bialik Square - Bialik Square, Tel Aviv,

On June 19th you are invited to turn off the TV, cancel all the other programs and join the global celebrations of the day of wanderings, simply by taking a slow and pointless walk through the streets.

World Sauntering Day is one of the most important events of the Slow movement and certainly one of the fun ones. The event was first celebrated in 1979 at the Grand Hotel in Michigan, which boasts the longest terrace in the world (201 meters). The initiator of the new holiday was a guy named WT Rabe who wanted to find an appropriate response to the growing popularity of jogging at the time, and the event, which roamed the porch back and forth, was designed to encourage people to take life easier, to slow down and enjoy the surrounding environment.

If thinking of leaving the house for purposeless walking sounds strange to you, it is only to blame the modern age, which has instilled in us utilitarian patterns of thinking. Everything that is done must have a clear goal and nullification is the mother of all sins. The day of the wanderings frees the person into leisure without worries or tasks culminating in the lazy and curious activity of wandering.

The wandering, it is important to note, is different from walking. The wanderer is the likeness of Flaneur, a term coined in France in the sixteenth century and described a man of leisure, a bum, an explorer / explorer of urban worlds and an expert on street affairs. Urban wandering is a winning combination, albeit ambivalent, of curiosity and laziness, and is a key figure in modern urban thinking, as well as in writing and art.

The wandering makes it possible to enjoy the public space that is being stolen, to know the urban environment, to discover hidden places, to be impressed by street art, to get into random conversations, to connect with ourselves, and no less to rebel. In her book, Arne Kazin writes that walking distance from a place of production to a place of consumption is not a place in itself, it is not part of the universe, and that the person who walks without reason is intolerable. The opposite of the consumer. ”

It seems that wanderings are so threatening to the world that the law is a crime. If you stop by a policeman while you stare, you will have to hurry up and explain your actions. You went to work. You went to visit a friend. You went shopping. The best you went shopping, there’s always something to buy. The day of wandering is, in this sense, no less than a call to revolt in utilitarian, industrial and consumerist times.

“A certain goal of wandering or a staggering allotment of time contradicts the true spirit of the wanderer,” wrote Edmund White, and indeed, we can not say how or where to roam. We can only plead with other wanderings – get out into the streets on our big holiday, there were agents wandering around random street passersby, and giving the masses the best lesson they could get in the course of leisure-education for wandering.

***
Despite the aforementioned lines, and despite the paradox of “organized” wandering, this year I am happy to return and set a meeting point from which we can go out and wander together (first, right now, and I would be happy to add more to the list).

On 19.06.1919 at 19:00 we will meet at Bialik Square in Tel Aviv (next to the fountain) and we will go wandering with the staff of “Etzbar” – an ecological house located right next to the square. As is well known, some of the fathers of wanderings used to leave the cities where they lived and wander in the wild nature that surrounded them. This year we will follow in their footsteps, only partially, and learn to know the nature that lives, exists and blooms in the heart of the city. Dr. Alon Eliran, an expert on nature assimilation, ecological gardening and urban gathering, will be led by Dr. Alon Eliran, and before we leave, we will meet Tami Zori, who established “A Tree of Light” and a good friend who will share her view of urbanism, Sustain and slow down,

see you in the streets,
Amit

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