On Walking

Of all the things the body does, walking is perhaps the one we think about least, which may be exactly why it is so good for thinking. Nothing could be more pedestrian, in either sense of the word. We learn it once, in infancy, with enormous effort and a great deal of falling over, and then we forget that we ever had to learn it at all. The legs proceed on their own; the mind, released from supervision, is free to wander. It is a curious arrangement, and it has been exploited, knowingly or not, by a long line of people whose work consisted largely of thinking.

Writers and philosophers have long walked in order to think. Henry David Thoreau devoted an entire essay, called simply "Walking", to the subject and treated it less as exercise than as a kind of calling. Charles Dickens was famous for his very long walks through London at night. What either man was thinking along the way, we can only guess, which is perhaps the point: a walk leaves no record except the work that follows it. It would be easy to compile a gallery of such figures and conclude that walking produces genius, but the conclusion should be resisted. For most of human history nearly everyone walked, because there was seldom any other way of getting anywhere, and the vast majority of those walkers left behind nothing more lasting than the paths they wore into the ground.

What walking offers, then, is not inspiration but conditions. It occupies the body just enough to keep the restless, self-monitoring part of the mind busy, without demanding the attention that running or climbing would require. It supplies a steady rhythm, and a view that changes slowly enough to be noticed and quickly enough to keep the mind from settling. Above all, it takes us away from the desk, where thinking becomes work and the blank page stares back like an impatient employer. Ideas seem to approach a walker the way birds approach someone who has stopped trying to catch them: not when they are pursued, but when attention is turned slightly away. Whether or not a laboratory could confirm this, most habitual walkers will recognize the experience.

Other ways of moving do not offer quite the same arrangement. The runner's mind is too often recruited to supervise the lungs; the driver sees the world through glass, framed and flattened into scenery; the train passenger has motion without agency and drifts into a doze or a screen. Walking, more than any of these, keeps us inside the landscape and in charge of our own pace. We can stop at a gate, turn back or take the longer way for no reason at all. In that small sovereignty, the freedom to go wherever the next step can reach, there is something that resembles the freedom of thought itself.

It is instructive that the two walkers named above could hardly have chosen more different settings. Thoreau sought out woods and fields; Dickens walked the streets of London after dark. If walking served them both, then whatever it offers cannot depend on beauty, or even on nature. It seems to require only a measure of solitude, a surface to walk on and the possibility of another step. A dull suburb will do; in a pinch, so will a hospital corridor.

If walking as a way of thinking is under threat, it is not because we have stopped walking but because we have learned to walk while doing something else. The walk has been converted into a workout, to be measured, tracked and compared, or furnished with a soundtrack, so that the mind, at the very moment it might have wandered, is handed something to listen to. There is nothing wrong with any of this. A podcast can brighten the journey to work, and a step counter may coax out of the house people who would otherwise stay in. But a walk that is always accompanied is a different activity from one that is not, as different as a lecture is from a daydream.

The remedy, if one is needed, is almost embarrassingly simple: to go out now and then without a destination, a device or any purpose more specific than the walk itself, and to let the mind do what it does when nothing is asked of it. I should confess that this essay was not written on foot. Most of it, however, was thought there, and the sentences that survived revision were, almost without exception, the ones that had been walked.