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In the writer’s guidebook for getting in and out of the head—for overcoming writer’s block— there is a paradoxical complement between the oft proffered advice to “go for a walk” and the instruction to create your “personal writing space.” Walking as a meditative and philosophical practice was famously romanticized in the Enlightenment period by the likes of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and English poet William Wordsworth. Its roots stretch further back, however, to Aristotle’s Peripatetic School in Ancient Greece, where student and teacher were thought to have walked beneath a colonnade connecting the temple of Apollo to the shrine of the Muse (Solnit 109). Beethoven found resonance walking among the woods, the trees, and the rocks, and Nietzsche observed that “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” (Aphorism 34).
Motility brings the body into relation with the world. Quantum physicists surmise that movement is ontologically primary to the emergence of time and space (Nail 2). It is primary, also, to the inevitable encounter with an Other. Perhaps this is why going for a walk is so essential to creative storytelling.
For as long as they have spilled ink, poets, writers, and artists have divided their body and souls between the comforts of their den or studio and the world in which they went searching for a muse, inspiration, or silent abandonment. Rousseau retreated to nature to meditate upon the ills of society. In The Confessions, he professed, “I can only meditate when I am walking … my mind only works with my legs” (344). In her study of the history of walking, Wanderlust (2001), Rebecca Solnit describes how Wordsworth, “[i]n his early twenties, … seems to have set about to systematically fail at every alternative to being a poet and chose wandering and musing as the preliminaries for realizing his vocation” (106).
In adopting the Latin phrase, Solvitur ambulando [“it is solved by walking”], one trusts that the problems of the mind can be resolved in pragmatic fashion by taking a walk. Yet, the appeal to practical knowledge should not invalidate thinking altogether; for to do so risks finding oneself a long way from home, not knowing how or why, and without bus fare to return. At the same time, there is an inherent futility in trying to combine highly creative or philosophical thought with the kind of step-counting, all conquering goal-oriented marching that we are, today, gadget-programmed to pursue. We can act and think but cannot simultaneously engage in both in a way that is genuinely complete. It is in this light that one reads Arthur Sidgwick’s advice in his Walking Essays (1912), in which he considers
…the attempt so often made to combine real walking with real talking is disastrous. Better the man who babbles and strolls, who trails his feet across country and his tongue across commonplace, than the man who tries to ventilate fundamental things while his body is braced to the conquest of road and hill. (Ch. 1)
In an age in which the digital nomad can literally carry their desk into the forest—pursuing the best of both worlds—we are often guilty of overlooking the value in decoupling one from the other. As a counter to Sidgwick’s invitation to stroll around babbling, taking to the trail with less vigorous intent, wandering aimlessly, one opens up space for luxurious creative thinking. It is not by retiring from an active life, as Plato would have it, in the coffee-fueled confines of the study, that one attains the lofty heights of philosophical thought. Rather, scholars in the field of imagination and creativity studies propose that creative insights and ‘aha’ moments are frequently revealed in moderately engaging activities: what they describe as the “shower effect” (Irving, et al., 2024; Murray, 2024; Ovington, 2018; Mooneyham and Schooler, 2013; Baird, 2012).
We are faced today with ever-expanding opportunities to engage, participate, contribute, activate, and connect—such that mental states are bombarded by an overwhelming volume and intensity of information. Finding a healthy way to switch off, but not fall off, is essential to a person’s overall physical and mental wellbeing, as it is to their mental clarity, creativity, and to escaping the dreaded stagnation of writer’s block. Regular moderate exercise—such as taking a walk—has a number of positive benefits for our physical, mental, and emotional health. It can also play a crucial role in cultivating social interactions and boosting confidence. Regular walking has been shown to lower blood pressure and increase good cholesterol (HDL-C) (Barone Gibbs, Bethany, et al., 2021), help maintain (though not increase) bone density, thus preventing osteoporosis (Benedetti, et al., 2018), and improve sleep quality (Bisson, et al., 2019; Wang and Boros, 2021). A study by Olafsdottir, et al. (2020) reported the double benefit of walking in nature, recording improvements in mood compared to watching nature scenes on screen or performing physical exercise on a treadmill. Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz (2014) recorded similarly with respect to the positive effects on creativity from walking outdoors as compared to sitting or walking on a treadmill.
Whether we exercise or not, taking a break from the grindstone is a necessary health practice, so much so that in some places it is supported by law. In Sweden, mandatory laws promoting mental and physical health require Swedes to take two fikor a day (the word fika, meaning a brief break, is derived from the Swedish word for coffee, kaffi). In Australia, it is still referred to as a ‘smoko,’ though bans on smoking in most workplaces may bring about a shift in the colloquial terminology. In classrooms throughout the world, the practice is commonly known as a ‘brain break.’
Throughout the 1950s and 60s, walking took on an aesthetic and creative nature all of its own in the hands of French intellectuals like Guy Debord. Debord’s theories of psychogeography and the dérive, or “drift,” reimagined the relationship between self and the spaces we produce rather than merely inhabit. Since then, the turn towards spatial and mobility studies in the humanities has seen a growing appreciation of walking aesthetics and methodologies and diverse application within pedagogic practice (Beyes and Steyaert, 2021), ethnography (Ingold and Vergunstm, 2008), as well as within social (Bates and Rhys-Taylor, 2017), embodied (Ernsten and Shepherd, 2024), and scientific research (O’Neill and Roberts, 2019).
“Roads,” according to Solnit, “hold a record of what has gone before … [and this] special relationship between tale and travel … [is,] perhaps, the reason why narrative writing is so closely bound up with walking” (72). From fragments of the past, held in stories and narratives of various forms, the imagination constructs new pathways—roads—which, according to Bakhtin, provide “a particularly good place for random encounters (“TCN” 243). While writing “carve[s] a new path through the terrain of the imagination” (Solnit 72), walking embeds the writer in the world so as to maintain a dialogue between text and experience, between the imagination and everyday life.
Works cited
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