The Ambling Mind

The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 6

Welcome to the Convivial Society. This is a newsletter about technology and culture, or, to borrow the title of my friend Lee Vinsel’s excellent podcast, peoples and things. The general idea is to think well about the meaning of technology and how it structures our experience while also conveying some sense of how we might better order our relationship to technology. In this installment, I offer some thoughts about walking, a core human activity, which has been increasingly neglected or marginalized in the modern world. What we stand to gain by walking reminds us of one of the key principles of a convivial society: there is a scale appropriate to the human experience, and we do well to operate within it.

I also happen to be celebrating a birthday as I write this installment. And what better gift than supporting the work with a paid subscription at a discounted rate of roughly $34/year or $3.75/month? Cheers!

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A few weeks back I shared a few lines from Kierkegaard about the virtues of walking. “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk,” Kierkegaard advised a friend in despair. “Every day,” he went on to say, “I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” This struck me as good counsel.

Since then, I’ve serendipitously encountered a handful of similar meditations on the value of walking, so I’ve taken that as sign to briefly gather some of these together and offer them to you, chiefly because they collectively remind us that there is a scale of activity and experience appropriate to the human animal and things tend to go well for us when we mind it.

I should acknowledge at the outset that I am not a highly accomplished walker, by which I mean someone who has walked extensively, in varied terrains, and has perhaps also reflected at some length on the practice.¹ I’m sure, though, that most people who I might think of as highly accomplished walkers would resist my characterization, and, I should add, I certainly don’t mean to encourage a hierarchical framing of what is a thoroughly egalitarian activity. Nonetheless, you get my point. I try to get out and walk a fair amount, but these are always modest and local walks.²

That said, I’ll first note the Latin phrase solvitur ambulando meaning “it is solved by walking.” The phrase is attributed to both St. Augustine and the Greek philosopher, Diogenes. The sense of it, as I take it, is that when you are stuck on something, you should get up and take a walk. By the act of walking you somehow allow your mind to think more freely and creatively.

In a 2014 report in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz confirmed the effect and postulated a series of causal mechanisms. Among other findings, the authors concluded that “walking substantially enhanced creativity.” They also wisely observed that “while schools are cutting back on physical education in favor of seated academics, the neglect of the body in favor of the mind ignores their tight interdependence.”

Or, as Nietzsche put it in an aphorism cited by Oppezzo and Schwartz, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

I wouldn’t go so far, but the spirit of the sentiment seems true enough. I’ve lately heard a great deal about how writing is a form of thinking. There is a stronger sense in which one could take that claim, but it at least means that the practice of writing, in its material and embodied dimensions, is conducive to and even sustains specific forms of thinking. In the same way, we might perhaps say that walking is a practice that is conducive to certain modes of thought. We can walk in order to think, just as some might write in order to think. My sense is that this has something to do with the pacing of our thoughts. Both writing and waking, each in their own way, seem to calibrate the tempo of our minds to the rhythm of thought.

This notion was also articulated by Rebecca Solnit when she observed “that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.”³ I stumbled upon this line in a recent essay for Noēma by the travel writer, Nick Hunt, who reflected on his walk from the Netherlands to Istanbul, a walk he undertakes in the footsteps of the great Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose three-volume memoir of his own walk across the continent on the eve of the Second World War is one of the great works of the 20th century, although quite difficult to categorize.⁴

“At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum,” Hunt astutely observed.

“One thing merges into the next: hills into mountains, rivers into valleys, suburbs into city centers; cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum. Traits and languages evolve, shading into one another and metamorphosing with every mile. Even borders are seldom borders, least of all ecologically. There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity.”

Hunt also brought the lovely phrase “the soul travels at the speed of walking” to my attention. It is apparently an old Arabic saying, and it is the insight at the heart of Hunt’s essay, which also reflects on the practice of pilgrimage. Not all walking amounts to a pilgrimage, of course, but we can think of all walks as potentially containing a kernel of the pilgrimage experience. In an old post about the distinction between the tourist and the pilgrim, I once noted that the tourist bends the place to the shape of the self while the pilgrim is bent to the shape of the journey. I do think the length of the journey matters in such cases, but perhaps a walk of any sort, if we set out in the proper spirit, might afford us the opportunity to practice the virtue of setting ourselves aside.

But if by walking we might learn to set ourselves aside, it is also true that we might learn how to better assert ourselves. I recently recalled an exchange during an interview in the mid-90s during which Ivan Illich claimed that modern technology had “disabled very simple native abilities” and made people “dependent on objects.” The interviewer, Jerry Brown, suggested, “Like an automobile.” To which Illich replied,

“An automobile which cuts out the use value from your feet […] I recently had the question, ‘You're a liar!’ when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the 16th, 17th century did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning but he can't walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.”

This was one iteration of Illich’s core criticism of late modern industrial tools, by which he meant both technologies and institutions: they had the tendency to render us hapless consumers of goods and service who no longer recalled what we were capable of doing for ourselves and for our communities.

It is also true, of course, that it is hard to walk anywhere because in the United States many of the places we live have been built for cars rather than for people. But the point still remains: the tool we think enhances our capacity may also diminish it. There is, then, a certain freedom to be re-discovered in walking, as well as a commensurate pleasure.

But valuable as these perspectives may be, it was another insight that finally compelled me to write this post. Two or three weeks back, Audrey Watters wrote in defense of walking in her excellent newsletter about fitness tech, Second Breakfast. The title of that installment was a line from the filmmaker Werner Herzog: “The world reveals itself to those who walk.”

That’s a wonderfully concise and profound observation. Of course, I was inclined to agree with the sentiment because it captures something I have been articulating, at much greater length, for some time now. The world is not simply present to us in its fullness and depth by virtue of the fact that we are capable of glancing at it. Instead, if we are to see the world, we must attend to it with care, patience, and even love.

This kind of attention can only unfold under certain conditions—solitude, silence, stillness—and in relation to certain virtues—humility, perseverance, charity. Among the conditions conducive to attentiveness I would also include deliberate slowness. Past a certain speed, we simply cannot perceive the world in depth.

I’m reminded of how in the fictional yet all-too-familiar society of Fahrenheit 451, thoughtlessness is abetted by enforced speed. At one point a key character, while talking about her quixotic family, discloses that being a pedestrian was quite rare and, in fact, illegal. “My uncle was arrested another time—did I tell you?—for being a pedestrian. Oh, we’re most peculiar.” And so would we be “most peculiar” if we chose to walk whenever reasonable.

As Watters observed in her essay, “Walking lets you read the world — and much like the slow, contemplative mental processes involved in reading a book, the pace with which one moves through the world while walking allows for a different, deliberative kind of seeing. You notice more. You think more.”⁵

To walk, then, is to inhabit a fitting scale and speed. It is the scale and speed at which our bodies are able to find their fit in the world, and the world rewards us by spurring our thinking and disclosing itself to us. Perhaps this is the deeper fitness we should actually be after.

This principle of proportionality or fittingness is one that we do well to remember and insist upon to whatever degree we are able because almost everything about the human-built world, in its economic and technological dimensions, is bent on pushing us past a human scale and speed, which then denies us the opportunity to cultivate our competence and enjoy its rewards. We are, in turn, sold a series of tools and techniques that promise to help us operate faster and more efficiently so that we may keep up with the inhuman demands. Some will even say that the point is to eventually slough off the encumbering body so that we may keep up with the machines and find our fit within the artificial systems we have built. Only exhaustion and alienation lie down this path.

Against these pressures, the act of walking might indeed prove revolutionary because it will afford us an experience of an alternative way of being in the world, one that honors the properly human scale of our experience.

1. Craig Mod and

Chris Arnade

come to mind as examples.

2. I do not have a bucket list, but if I did walking the Camino de Santiago would be very high on the list.

3. There is a well-known book of Christian spirituality published in 1979 titled The Three Mile an Hour God: Biblical Reflections. It was written by the Japanese theologian, Kosuke Koyama. I’ve not read the book, so I cannot commend it. But I thought I would mention it nonetheless.

4. I discovered Hunt’s essay in one of Kai Brach’s weekly Dense Discovery newsletters. Fermor’s trilogy about his journey consists of the following three titles: A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, The Broken Road.

5. Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, also likens reading to walking and conceives of both as act potential resistance to the dominant social structures which seek our conformity.