The Wonder of Walking

What I read: Wanderlust: Rebecca Solnit on How Walking Vitalizes the Meanderings of the Mind by Maria Popova on her Brain Pickings blog.

I go for a walk every day. It’s one of the best things I do for myself.

Maybe it’s the need we had to find a refreshing alternative to the months of pandemic lockdown. Perhaps it’s because research is continually arriving at the conclusion that walking is good for us. Or maybe the need for time outdoors with our own thoughts is becoming increasingly necessary in our fast-paced world.

Regardless of the reason, intentional walking is popular and touted regularly in health and mainstream publications.

As I approach 67 years of age, walking has become a daily habit that seems to accumulate an endless array of benefits for us older folk. As Barbara Stepko writes for AARP in 8 Great Reasons to Walk More, walking can add years to your life, bolster your brain function, help you slim down, improve vision, alleviate insomnia, foster relaxation, and ward off depression. Of course, walking offers all those benefits and more to everyone of any age.

For those of us who are older and have some mild cognitive impairment, there’s good news about walking too as Gretchen Reynolds mentions in Brisk Walking Is Good for the Aging Brain.

Brisk walking improves brain health and thinking in aging people with memory impairments, according to a new, yearlong study of mild cognitive impairment and exercise. In the study, middle-aged and older people with early signs of memory loss raised their cognitive scores after they started walking frequently. Regular exercise also amplified the healthy flow of blood to their brains. The changes in their brains and minds were subtle but consequential, the study concludes, and could have implications not just for those with serious memory problems, but for any of us whose memories are starting to fade with age.

As a writer, I find that my daily walks are when ideas spring forth, often out of nowhere it seems. Previously pondered ideas get pulled apart and reconnected in new ways. Insights emerge that run deeper than I would have imagined prior to the walk.

By no means am I the first writer to stumble upon the upsides of walking. As Ferris Jabr states in Why Walking Helps Us Think,

Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.

Jabr then encapsulates what numerous other research studies have reported as some of the biochemistry behind improved thinking while walking.

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.

While countless medical research institutions such as the Mayo Clinic espouse the plentiful physical and brain function benefits of walking, for me it’s the less tangible that keeps my donning my walking shoes and embarking on a journey each day through my neighborhood and beyond.

In the article upon which this post is founded, Maria Popova wrote about some of the writers who have penned homages to walking as counterpoint to the busyness of life.

“Of all ridiculous things,” Kierkegaard wrote in contemplating our greatest source of unhappiness, “the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.” Just a few years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, another sage of the ages considered a particularly perilous form of briskness — in 1861, Thoreau penned his timeless treatise on walking and the spirit of sauntering. Half a century later, Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser captured this spirit in his short story “The Walk,” which includes this exquisite line: “With the utmost love and attention the man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing, be it a child, a dog, a fly, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower, a man, a house, a tree, a hedge, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a hill, a leaf, or no more than a poor discarded scrap of paper on which, perhaps, a dear good child at school has written his first clumsy letters.”

Popova then goes on to point out that the remarkable activist and writer Rebecca Solnit has written beautifully “about walking, it’s cultural history, and its spiritual rewards” in her 2000 book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Solnit’s writing is a poetic honoring of the art and practice of walking. She points out that the metaphysical meanderings that can come about while walking transcend the functional utility of getting from point A to point B via our legs.

Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic. Here this history begins to become part of the history of the imagination and the culture, of what kind of pleasure, freedom, and meaning are pursued at different times by different kinds of walks and walkers.

This high order of walking is described by Solnit as wanderlust.

wanderlust - strong longing for or impulse toward wandering

(Definition from Merriam-Webster dictionary.)

Meandering, wandering, sauntering. All of these words conjure not the act of walking for its physical or functional benefits, at least not solely, but rather the beauty of walking as a meditative and contemplative practice – a tip of the hat to the randomness of the stroll. This is what seems to attract me more so than the physical and mental fitness aspects, although I don’t discount that walking is my consciously chosen form of cardiovascular exercise.

As a technologist myself, it was Solnit’s articulate admonition of the busyness of life that invades our walking moments that jumped out at me. Requiring each moment of our lives to be productive can taint the peace and breadth walking can foster. I am guilty of succumbing to the socially enforced productivity hamster wheel, including during my walks. Solnit describes this malady.

I found [an ad] in the Los Angeles Times … for a CD-ROM encyclopedia, and the text that occupied a whole page read, “You used to walk across town in the pouring rain to use our encyclopedias. We’re pretty confident that we can get your kid to click and drag.” I think it was the kid’s walk in the rain that constituted the real education, at least of the senses and the imagination. Perhaps the child with the CD-ROM encyclopedia will stray from the task at hand, but wandering in a book or a computer takes place within more constricted and less sensual parameters. It’s the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value.

While I still endeavor to make good use of my time, and that may indeed mean that I fire up some brain cells during my walk to solve a tricky problem or construct a soon-to-be-written narrative, I now strive to be the kid walking in the rain. I want more unpredictable incidents between the official events of my life. Perhaps you do too. If so, I suggest you go for a walk. Maybe the magic of meandering or the wonder of the wander will wash upon you like a wave of sultry insight. It’s worth a try.