Apparently Jean-Jacques Rousseau (famous French philosopher) did his best thinking on trips he made alone and on foot. He called them ‘thought walks‘. He’s not alone in this. Aristotle, Socrates, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sigmund Freud, Henry David Thoreau, William Wordsworth, Michel Foucault, Nastassja Martin and Michael Michalko are also known for thought walking. While I am not nearly as well known as any of them, it’s while walking that my imagination is fired up (so you don’t have to be famous to benefit from it).
THE DARK MIDDLE OF COVID
I try to walk 3 or 4 times a week, mostly with a retractable leash in each hand, me being towed by a Beagle, and me encouraging along a cross-Border Collie / Golden Retriever. A truly pull-me-pull-you experience (not to be confused with the pushmi-pullyu found in the Dr Dolittle universe). My love of walking began during the dark-middle of Covid, when the South African Government, generously and graciously (read as much sarcasm into that as possible) granted its subjects a 4 hour window each morning, and released us out onto the streets for exercise and general health, as long as you were within 5km of your home and kept a safe distance from anything else that breathed.
Each morning I took my dogs and me, armed with a plastic bag, for a 5km walk, to experience some freedom, and to clean my street.
It was during this period that I discovered, after the noise in my head had eventually died down, that incredible insights, thoughts, and a few marvelous fantastical ideas began to fill my mind. I became addicted, and have made regular walking a staple part of my weekly diet.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE WALK?
Ferris Jabr, in an article from The New Yorker, Why Walking Helps Us Think, offers this suggestion with regard to what happens when we walk:
What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.
Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight.
That’s precisely what I almost always experience when I walk. The dogs are always a distraction, so I’m not trying to think about anything, except maybe our collective survival, and yet I’m pleasantly amazed at what I arrive home with, inside of my head.
THOUGHT WALKING
There is lots to read on the interwebs about walking, the mind, imagination and creativity. ‘Thought Walking’ seems to be a touch more of a focussed and goal orientated approach. Michael Michalko in an article, Thought Walking, alerted me the concept:
Whenever you’re deeply involved with a problem, take a thought walk. You will find walking around your neighborhood, a shopping mall, a park, the woods, industrial complex and so on to be highly stimulating. Look for interesting objects, situations, or events that are interesting or that can be metaphorically compared with whatever project you happen to be working on.
I’d not set out to ‘thought walk’ when my Covid freedom-walking began. I didn’t have any specific problems to solve, and I didn’t set out with anything particular in mind to think about. I just needed to break free, see other humans, give my dogs some exercise, and clean my street. However, I recognised the results of my walking when I read his article. When I had something pressing and banging around my cranium, I did often have new insight and sometimes an epiphany moment, on how I could try and approach it or solve it, once I’d returned home.
A TINY EXAMPLE
Since reading his article I’ve attempted to be a little more goal oriented to test the idea of ‘thought walking’. I start by thinking about something that I’m working on before we set off, and then allow the magic to begin. Remember, as per above, I’m mostly in a collective survival mode (the dogs and I making it back in one piece). It definitely has produced some interesting ideas and thoughts.
Recently I had been struggling with a group of friends. Things weren’t flowing between us like they had been, and it occupied more space in my head than I wanted it to, with no obvious way ahead. I plugged that in, and set off down to a local river. I kept trying to bring the issue to the front and centre of my mind, only to be physically and forcefully pulled backwards and forwards by my two walking companions. As my frustration grew, I suddenly realised that the three of us weren’t on my walk. We each had a very different agenda (I had to suppose a few things about each of my dogs) as to why we were on this walk. My frustration was growing because the dogs had zero interest in having empathy for me, and I’m sure they had no empathy for each other, and I had no empathy for either of them.
It was only when I realised that only when I accepted that I was only one third of this walking tribe, that my frustration reduced, and I started to enjoy my walk again.
BOOM! POW!
It’s obvious when I write that all down, however, in the moment, there was nothing obvious about anything. My walks have forever changed, and my relationships with the group of friends have slowly improved. You might be thinking, as I am, that I was the only problem in the friend group? Quite possibly 🙂
SOME GREAT QUOTES ABOUT WALKING AND THINKING
In reading for the writing above, I came across some fabulous quotes, and wasn’t sure where to put them in the copy above. I didn’t want to lose them, so here they are below:
“It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.” – Charles Dickens
“Take the body outside, and use it not as a tool but as a companion, a friend, to make thought more alive, more dynamic.” – Simon Parcot
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” – Henry David Thoreau
“Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” – Thomas DeQuincey