Bunny is a writer and jazz singer who’s built a following on Instagram (@bunny_fitzgerald) and Patreon (patreon.com/bunnyfitzgerald) by chronicling her barefoot lifestyle.  Her new book, “The Barefoot Manifesto:  How I stopped Wearing Shoes and Started Living,” is a deeply personal, lyrical, and forceful account of why she walks this interesting path.  But the book is not a practical guide to foot health.  Nor is it about style.  Rather, Bunny positions the manifesto as a “book about freedom” with the key themes being personal sovereignty and the primacy of sensation.

The backstory is simple enough.  In the wake of an unsuccessful relationship, Bunny was at a low point.  She felt she needed to do something radical to shake herself out of a “fog” of inauthenticity.  She felt she needed somehow to go “off script.”  One day, as an experiment, she chose to leave home without her shoes.  She felt tentative at first, but the sensations from walking barefoot were intriguing.  And there was the electric thrill of doing something different, without asking for permission.  Then she burned her bridges – she threw out or gave away all her shoes.  This was about three years ago, and since then she hasn’t looked back.    

The Fear of Being Different

America has a history of intellectual rebellion.  “Whosoever would be a man must be a nonconformist” – this was the battle cry of the father of American Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson.  He would surely have approved of Bunny – indeed, I believe he would have really liked her, for her manifesto preaches defiance against mindless rules that make no sense. 

Back in the 1960s, you sometimes saw people going around barefoot for fun, a practice which was embraced wholeheartedly by the hippies.  But conventional-minded people felt uncomfortable around such free spirits.  They struck back by introducing those familiar signs, “no shoes, no shirts, no service.”  Today, it’s rare to see people in America without shoes.  Footwear has become a component of the “uniform of acceptability,” as Bunny puts it.  Indeed, the requirement to wear shoes, sandals, or at least flip-flops, has become a kind of unwritten social rule.  But this is a “fake rule,” Bunny points out, since there are no federal or state laws or health codes requiring footwear. 

Many people believe shoes are important for safety, but Bunny disagrees.  She argues that barefooting is not “inherently dangerous,” because the body is not “inherently flawed.”  Yes, there are germs, glass, and even needles out there, but in her experience, when you watch where you step and move thoughtfully, these risks are “vanishingly rare.”

Maybe other people would like to shed their shoes on occasion, but they don’t want to draw attention to themselves.  Bunny acknowledges the social tension that results from doing things differently.  She reports that she’s been called “disgusting,” as well as brave, crazy, and inspiring.  But to her, it’s OK to be a little “weird and inconvenient” — social discomfort is a small price to pay for the freedom to make your own decisions.  Indeed, she is unsympathetic towards conformists, regarding social discomfort as merely “fear in another outfit”– the mental alarm of people who struggle to process differences in behavior, or, even worse, the angst of those who feel threatened by the possibility that they’ve bought into and based their life on all sorts of fake rules.

Embracing Sensation

That Bunny stands up for herself is admirable, but where the manifesto gets really interesting is in her discussion of sensation. 

She reminds us that the feet contain as many nerve endings as the hands.  Nerves in the feet send detailed information to the brain about the nature of the surfaces we tread upon, which is critical for balance, agility, and safety. 

Bunny reports that when walking barefoot, “every step is a conversation.  Not always a pleasant one.  But always a real one.”  Surfaces can be dirty.  Sticky.  Hot.  In the winter dangerously cold.  Yet they can also be immensely pleasurable – like soft dirt, moss, or smooth pavement.   

The information flowing from the soles is not monotonous, but rather rich in contrast and intensity. 

Now, many of us get enough intensity at work, or dealing with friends and family, or scrolling through social media feeds and reacting to the latest outrage.  It’s totally understandable that people shield their feet and forgo the intensity of barefoot sensations in order to allocate cognitive resources to other information flows.

The problem is that shielding the feet is part of a bigger and more problematic trend – that modern people shield themselves from so many sources of physical sensation.  People run and walk much less than they used to (hunter gatherers are said to average 8-10 miles per day).  We push, pull, lift, and climb much less.  Jobs requiring manual labor have been declining for years.  Sure, there is a vocal minority of fitness enthusiasts, but the majority of modern people seem willing to accept an indoors, sedentary lifestyle with limited physical exertion or sensation.  To be fair, this allows them to focus on cognitive work as they sit behind computers, which is far more productive than the manual labor of yesteryear.

However, Bunny finds that physical sensation provides meaningful benefits.  She experiences a “conversation” between feet and ground which is a “non-verbal, non-rational, deeply physical language that bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the bones.”  In the manifesto, she contrasts this sensory experience with her earlier efforts to develop mental frameworks by reading and studying.  Today, the sensations of going barefoot tell her things that “no amount of thinking ever could.” 

Which raises an interest question — could it be that physical and mental activity are connected?  Actually, such connection would reflect the consensus of contemporary scientists, who believe that physical activity promotes cognitive development and protects against decline.  And this idea is not new.  Consider a selected list of prominent persons for whom walking was an essential part of the creative process:  Aristotle, Charles Dickens, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Henry David Thoreau, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla, Charles Darwin, James Watt, and Virginia Woolf, to name a few.  The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that “all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”  For the English poet, William Wordsworth, daily walks were an essential part of his creative process – in essence, a form of meditation in motion, during which he composed much of his poetic output.  By some estimates, he may have walked 175,000 miles in his lifetime.  Granted these individuals wore shoes, but if barefoot produces more intense sensations, maybe you wouldn’t have to walk as far.  Perhaps this was part of the insight that led Ancient Greek philosophers, such as Socrates and Diogenes, to go around barefoot, or Christian saints like St. Francis and St. Claire of Assisi, as well as various Hindu Gurus and Buddhist Monks.

Rewilding the Human Spirit

Bunny’s manifesto is about a subtle change in mindset. She reports —

“You start to notice textures you never felt before—cool tile, warm gravel, soft moss, sun-baked concrete. You begin to listen with your feet. And through that listening, something ancient wakes up. It’s a kind of primal awareness. A sense of place. Of intuition. Of rhythm. You move differently. More carefully. More sensually. You become part of your surroundings instead of hovering above them.”

She contrasts this mindset with that of clumping along in protective footgear which shields you from sensations, while thinking ahead to the daily list of tasks to do, or distracted by beeps and messages, things to buy or random irritations, while completely unaware of/disconnected from the surroundings.  For her, this is a life of “automation.”  It’s like being on auto-pilot.

For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that within the brain, there are different bundles of circuitry – some to manage conscious problem-solving tasks, which is our focus when sitting behind computers – and others to monitor sensations associated with physical exertion, including the task of moving the unshielded body across rough terrain.  Suppose, too, that these different circuits are somehow interconnected.  Integrated.  Intertwined.

If this is so, then the inexorable slide towards indoors sedentary existence might not be all good.  If Bunny’s experience is indicative, as we put more focus on conscious problem-solving, we may be losing capabilities in other areas, like awareness, focus, intuition, creativity, rhythm, and connection.

Or maybe not. There are still plenty of physical sensations in modern life:  the sweet and salty taste of gourmet food, the altered states that comes from consuming alcohol and drugs, the exhilaration of sex, the pleasant warmth from soaking in a bath or hot tub, the thrill of victory and agony of defeat we feel in the gut when our favorite teams compete, the sensation of relief when artificial intelligence delivers a cogent answer sparing us the labor of doing research.  We cannot state with authority that these sensations are inadequate.

Nonetheless, it’s probably a good idea to keep an eye on outliers like Bunny – people who are not afraid to probe the boundaries of conventional thinking.  Who knows what they will discover?