A Writer Went Walking

I've been thinking a lot about walking. Coincidentally, I was reminded about walking and its intrinsic connection to writing when I was...taking a walk. It is the ultimate mindful release. One foot in front of the other—briskly or leisurely wandering. And it has been celebrated by writers for centuries. 

Great writers walked. William Wordsworth, it has been said, walked some 180,000 miles in his lifetime. Virginia Woolf walked the English countryside. Dickens walked at night when he couldn't sleep. Hemingway walked to work out kinks and hiccups in his writing. Think A Moveable Feast. Henry Miller said most writing happened away from the typewriter, much of the work while out for a walk. And Henry David Thoreau famously walked in the woods around Walden four hours each day. “The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours …but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day," Thoreau wrote. 

We know the health benefits. Blood flow. Exercise for the muscles. But there is also mindfulness. Silence. Solitude. Walking permits the gods to enter your spirit, especially when one has no destination. No place to be. No set agenda. No Google map to adhere to. It's the essence of freedom; freedom at its most primal. Walking frees the mind. Famous thinkers walked. Aristotle—a great mind working while moving. John Muir—the man who walked through the woods he called home. And the Danish writer, Soren Kierkegaard who wrote until noon each day and then walked his way through Copenhagen each afternoon—thinking and writing in his head. "I have walked myself into my best thoughts," Kierkegaard said. 

But yet, with all this talk of walking and its benefits for the creative mind, one must also be reminded of the beauty a simple walk allows—for the process itself, when properly permitted, is a journey of the soul. 

I leave you with Rilke. 

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

                       —Rainer Maria Rilke