Nicholas Higgins 06/07/2020

Solvitor Ambulando

‘Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement - in which the muscles do not also revel’, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882)

Walking is hardly exciting. So unsexy is walking that out word for someone who travels by foot - ‘pedestrian’ - is also a synonym for ‘dull’ and ‘ordinary’. It is slow and it is inconvenient. If we want to get from A-B as quickly and as easily as possible, we would surely drive, slide or fly? 

But these methods of movement make free wheeling, autonomous man, sedentary and passive. On planes, trains and buses you do not physically move, you are just jolted along on top of something that moves. And by deciding to step onto a bus or a train, have you not instanteously surrendered your free will? The journey is no longer ’your’ journey, it is left at the mercy of famously inefficient TFL managers. Yet still we become furious when buses are inevitably delayed and trains overbooked. Walking (and cycling) by contrast, make you master of your own fate. You set the sails of your own journey. You move your own body and you set the pace. 

But why limit walking to today’s A-B way of things? Indeed, if you’ve ever observed a Londoner walking to work, their brows are furrowed, their eyes are stared intently at the pavement or glued to their smartphone. The journey itself is unimportant, it’s just a goal to be accomplished, a fact to be endured. But what if the humble walk was pursued for its own sake? What if we wandering and floated, just for the hell of it? This is not a cold, utilitarian ‘walk’, but a romantic ‘saunter’, ‘ramble’ and ‘promenade’, or what the Italians call a passeggiata. 

This might sound like a waste of time to the man of business, but to the curious and creative spirit, it is fertile ground. Where automobiles cocoon you in steel and underground systems plunge you into the subterranean depths, sauntering exposes you to all the colour and vibrancy of the modern world. You hear, smell and taste a living, breathing city. Rambling through London is to walk amongst thousands of years of history. There are undiscovered side-streets to explore, shopkeepers to talk too, architecture to admire and statues to ponder. This provides the unmistakable sense of being where you are, instead of watching it whistle pass a window, you feel it, engage with it, interact with it.

To walk thus requires an inquisitive and interested mind. It necessitates you to open your eyes, to see the beauty in what is familiar and quotidian. Walter Benjamin reminds us to ‘walk out of your front door as if you’ve just arrived in a foreign country, to discover the world in which you already live, to begin the day as if you’ve just gotten off the boat from Singapore and have never seen your own doormat or the people on the landing’. Yet how many people barley glance at St Paul’s Cathedral as they drudge too and from the office? Instead of enjoying the city like the happy wanderer, they’ve become victims of it. Work, stress and anxiety has sucked the last dregs of curiosity that ever was in them.

Sacrificing the idle walk not only makes life bland, it stifles original, creative thought. This isn’t some old folklore. A recent study by Stanford researchers found that a persons creative output increased by 60% when walking. Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander. Like the Romantic poets of old we can be inspired by the things we see. It was the sight of daffodils on a walk that lead William Wordsworth to pen his most famous poem, ‘I wondered lonely as a cloud’. 

But we can also be inspired by the things we don’t see, our thoughts. The solitary walk gives space for pondering the self, exploring concepts and brooding on deep ideas. ‘When I stop, I cease to think, my mind only works with my legs’, so said Jean Jaques Rousseau. Student’s of Aristotle’s school of philosophy were known as the ‘peripatetic’ philosophers - those ‘given to walk about’. Michael de Montaigne famously had no fire in his study, preferring to warm both mind and body by walking: ‘My thoughts will sleep if I seat them’, he declares… ‘my wit will not budge if my legs do not shake it up’. Nikola Tesla’s idea for his AC induction motor came to him when he was sauntering through Budapest. As he passed through a park and gazed at the sunset, ‘the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed’.

Perhaps HR managers should mandate a compulsory ‘walking hour’ for their ailing workers? Taking a lunchtime gander, you leave the office behind, you go out, stroll around, see the world and think about other, weightier things. Even if briefly, you escape the constraints of work and throw off the yoke of routine. As the great thinkers of the past prove, this can be a space where profound insights are gained and innovations are proffered up. Office cubicles and laptop screens do not set the mind set adrift on such frothing seas of thought.

Walking is elemental to who we are as human beings. It was when the human animal got up on his hind legs that he made the leap from ape to Homo Sapiens. It is open to almost everyone, whether young or old, rich or poor. It can be participated no matter where you are. How puzzling, then, that we have so shunned walking in favour of speed and convenience. This is a phyrric victory. For when we saunter we engage mind, body and spirit.  We come to appreciate the world in its abundant richness and all its rotten glory. We come to know our thoughts and plumb the depths of our own creativity.

To watch, to think, to walk, ay there’s the rub!