Among the struggles of being one of 31,040 students at Iowa State is the challenge of safely navigating sidewalks. With more students on campus than ever, the places designated as walking space are more congested than ever.

And we all know the problems of walking on a sidewalk under even the best conditions. One person at the front of the line sets the pace for most of the people walking behind, and if that person ambles along, timeliness gets cast to the winds. At this point, it doesn’t really make much sense to ride a bicycle around, since the pedestrian activity holds a monopoly on the pavement.

The inconvenience may be trivial, but some personal danger accompanies it. Bikers eager to get from one place to another might zip along, threading their way through foot traffic; walkers might pick up their pace and push people along or veer off the sidewalk and blaze their own trail without thinking about whether the ground they step on will keep them upright. We cannot tell you how many times taking a quick step has knocked us off balance.

One of concerns the university has about people walking across campus without using sidewalks is the creation of cow paths, which are paths of dirt created when lots of people use the same route through grassy space.

But if you think about it, most of those sources of danger are due to haste, recklessness and a lack of thought.

Iowa State has a beautiful campus, and it isn’t prohibitively huge. Iowa State is not a vast expanse of wilderness that tests the limits of human endurance and exploration when we try to navigate it, nor is it spread throughout a city of identical office buildings. Walking everywhere is a very real possibility. All we need to do to make it safer is take the headphones out of our ears, get our noses out of our cellphones and iPods and adopt some self-awareness of our surroundings and the other people in our bubbles.

Walking with a sense of responsibility also applies to our choice of where we walk. Whether we take the possibility that we could all create dirt sidewalks out of our beautiful lawn seriously or not, that possibility exists. And it says a lot about our community’s priorities. Are we so absorbed in where we’re going that we lose sight of where we are? Or are we willing to exercise some second thought and discretion to take care of the environment where we are for the present?

Who knew that how we feel about sidewalks could reflect how we feel about our world and way of life?