Who knew that using your feet would mean taking your life into your hands!

An article by C. W. Nevius in the San Francisco Chronicle last week looked at how dangerous it is to be a pedestrian in San Francisco. He pointed out that half the traffic fatalities in San Francisco are pedestrians, compared to only around 15 or 20 percent in other similarly sized cities.

The standard reaction to a pedestrian fatality is to blame bad drivers, motorists distracted by talking on the phone, texting, tuning the radio, changing the CD or staring at their iPod trying to decide what to listen to next, drinking coffee, even putting on makeup.

But I also think we need to add another group to that list – clueless pedestrians.

I ride a scooter around town and have learned through painful experience to always be hyper vigilant. I start each journey by assuming the other motorists on the road are drunk, crazy, blind or all three – that way I don’t allow myself to believe that they see me or even know what they are doing. Sadly, all too often my assumptions are proven correct.

But I also make the same assumptions about pedestrians. It never ceases to amaze me how many pedestrians seem blissfully unaware of the world around them.

Every day I see people crossing the street against a red light, often when there is traffic whizzing by. Every day I see people walking down the street reading a book or newspaper, not watching where they are going (this might explain why the number of newspaper readers is declining rapidly – they are all dying because they are too busy reading the paper in the street and not paying attention to what’s around them) Every day I see people walking around, listening to music on their iPods or other devices, lost in their own little world. And every day I see tourists standing in the middle of the road, trying to get one of those quintessential San Francisco photos of steep hills and breathtaking views.

It’s no wonder that every so often an unaware pedestrian gets hit by a distracted driver – with the driver always coming out on top.

Now, I’m not blaming pedestrians for being hit any more than I am saying motorists are always to blame – I’m saying we all have to take responsibility for our own actions and our own behaviour.

I know if I don’t pay close attention to everyone and everything around me then I could easily end my journey in the Emergency Department of my own hospital – not that they aren’t lovely, skilled people in the ED, it’s just that I want to be a colleague, I don’t want to be a customer.

All it takes is one driver suddenly changing lanes without signaling, or for a pedestrian to walk out from between two parked cars, at night, wearing all black, and my future is precarious.

Everyone needs to be aware of where they are and what they are doing.

Last year the American College of Emergency Physicians released a report warning about the dangers of what they called “oblivious texting”, people who injured themselves or were even killed because they were trying to text people while walking down the street. Some walked into lamp posts and bashed their head. Some stepped off a curb into oncoming traffic. Neither resulted in a happy ending. And for a text!!

Maybe we need to put signs on street corners and busy intersections saying “Before operating feet, engage brain.”

I love being up just after the sun has risen. OK, let me rephrase that. I hate getting up but I love being up just after the sun has risen. There is something magical about that time of day, there’s a freshness to everything, the streets are quiet and there’s a sense of possibility about the day ahead.

But what I love most is the silence, the lack of cars or other noises that assault our ears the rest of the day. It’s such a wonderful sound that it makes it worth the effort to drag myself out of bed just to hear it.

There is a line in the W. B. Yeats poem, The Lake Isle of Inisfree, that always comes to mind in that early hour;  “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings”

Such silence is a rare and precious commodity, so we have to enjoy it wherever and whenever we can.

The other day Shirley and I were walking on a trail in the woods alongside a reservoir. It was gorgeous. Sunlight streaming through lush greenery, the wind whipping tiny waves on the water; the only sound was bird song and the wind blowing through the trees.

And then you heard it. At first muffled, then louder, accompanied by the slap of feet on the ground and heavy breathing. It was a too-loud iPod pumping music directly into a jogger’s ears, and overflowing out to taint the world around  her.

The music got louder as she drew level with us, and then, as she plodded puffing off into the distance, the sound gradually disappeared with her, but it left me a little sad that here she was, surrounded by beauty and wonder, and she was shutting herself off from it.

I know that running can be tough and sometimes you need a little something to pep you up, but this gal was running along a beautiful country trail, surrounded by incredible sounds and she was blocking them with some raucous rock.

Now, not only is too-loud music bad for your hearing (as someone who spent too many years listening to too loud rock I can tell you that it takes its toll over time) but it’s even worse when you have the source directly inside your ear. Even Apple’s own iPod manual has a section saying “Warning: Permanent hearing loss may occur if earphones or headphones are used at high volume.” Yet to pump that into your ear when you are already surrounded by wonderful sounds seems a terrible waste.

How often do you get to be in a place that is so quiet that you can hear the world as it used to be, uncontaminated by planes or cars or industrial sounds? Not very often. So why would you choose to ruin one of those few occasions by blocking those sounds with music you can hear anytime, anywhere.

Sometimes we just get so caught up in our day-to-day routines that we fail to see the wonder around us, fail to appreciate that just being quiet and listening to the world can be an amazing experience.

It’s not hard. All we have to do is turn off the music and open up our minds. It’s right there in front of us, if only we listen.