The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.” It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. She begins by describing the mechanics of marching: After all, how many artists have met the muse on a meandering walk? Beethoven took long, leisurely strolls with a pen and sheet music handy ( excursions his biographer Anton Schindler believed “resembled the swarming of the bee to gather honey”) whereas Mozart noted that is was during promenades in the park that his ideas flowed most “abundantly.” Throughout time, it seems, quiet country roads have been the site of revelation and epiphany.Ī writer who can find holiness and exquisite beauty in the most overlooked, ordinary activities, Rebecca Solnit explores the creative, intellectual and spiritual benefits of walking in her 2000 masterpiece Wanderlust.
Something about the mechanical motion of lifting one foot and extending it in front of the other makes it easier to hear the divine whisperings of inspiration. Thinkers throughout time have been avid walkers, from William Wordsworth (“The act of walking is indivisible from the act of making poetry: one begets the other,” he argued) to Henry David Thoreau (“The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow,” he wrote in a journal entry dated August 19, 1851). But though walking serves the practical function of getting us from one point to another, it also possesses a profounder power to reinvigorate the mind and replenish the soul.
Ever since we evolved from the quadruped crawling of our toddler years, we’ve been putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes we stride along the beach joined hand-in-hand with our partner, the coastline melting into a pink-orange sunset other times, we amble through our local park going nowhere in particular still other times, we trek through groves of redwoods and Douglas fir to witness breathtaking panoramic views from the top of a bluff. Is there any occupation as prosaic as walking? We walk from our bed to the kitchen to make our morning coffee, out the front door to go to work, to the corner store to grab groceries.
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