ERLING KAGGE: I think the world has partly turned insane in the sense that we spend,
like, three or four hours every day just looking down on a screen. And the whole idea that
you can explore the world, get to know people, respect the environment, to love the earth
just by sitting and watching a screen is problematic. It's wrong, and it's also one of the reasons
why people feel so unhappy today. They claim to be very sad. They claim to be lonely and
depressed. I think this partly, to a great degree, comes down to us just looking down
and not looking up around us and up towards the sky, because that's what makes life worth
living.
I think we're all born explorers. When I look at kids, they would like to climb before they
can walk. Eventually, when they learn how to walk before they can talk, they walk over
to the sitting room, across the floor, out through the door, and wondering what's hidden
behind the horizon. And this humans have been doing for 200,000 years. It was not Homo sapiens
who invented walking on two legs. It was a possibility, walking on two legs; we invented
Homo sapiens. So we have always been discovering the world in a truly physical way. And that's
one of the reasons why walking is so important. Because today, most people are sitting on
their arses in a chair looking at the screen to discover and explore the world. And that's
a huge misunderstanding. You're missing out on some of the greatest things in life.
I'm very curious. Curiosity is a driving force for me. And when I walk—like I walked to
the studio here in New York—I try to watch people, do people watching. And of course,
their faces pass so quickly in the street. So it's kind of hard to tell what people are
thinking and what's going on in their mind. I have a longer time to see how they walk.
And quite often, you can actually see how they feel by the way they're walking. You
can even sometimes feel what kind of professions they have when you look at them walking.
For instance, like police officers and officers in the army, they walk totally different from
other people. A priest also walks, has a different gait. While you can see the homeless people
in New York and the beggars, they walk totally different. So somehow, what they're doing
is inscribed in their bodies and inscribed in the way they're walking. Like a homeless
guy, he walks absolutely the opposite way than an officer in the army. He walks bit
like this. His knees are sagging down a bit like this. So, you know, the way you walk
can actually tell you a lot.
To me, as a Norwegian, the best way to experience silence is to just walk in one direction out
of the city where I'm living and to let it get really quiet around me, and stay there
for a few days and nights and experience silence. But obviously, if you live in New York, that's
not so simple. So I think you can actually find silence absolutely everywhere, in the
sense that you need to invent your own silence. You can't wait for silence to come to you.
You have to start to explore this inner silence—the silence which is inside you at all times and
waiting for you. Just try to discover what's going on in your mind and in your body. You
can do meditation to do it. You can do yoga. You can do mindfulness. But to me, you actually
don't need any techniques. I think you can do it by just walking. And if you don't have
time to walk long distances, try to walk the stairs. Try to walk to the metro. Try to walk
to your office. And then you will find this inner silence if you're really interested
in it.