Walking as Thinking

The walk is older than the desk and works better. For most of human history, the people who needed to think carefully — philosophers, statesmen, mathematicians, writers — did the thinking while walking. The fact has been recovered and re-discovered every few decades and then quietly forgotten as the next generation tries to do its thinking in a chair.

The chair is not bad. The chair is for writing down what the walk produced. The walk is where the producing happens. The mechanism is partly that the body, busy with the rhythm of locomotion, releases the mind from the small work of containing itself. The thought arrives the way a small animal arrives at a quiet clearing — not because you searched for it, but because you stopped scanning.

There are rules to the walk, which are not really rules. The first is that you cannot bring the phone in any active capacity. The phone in airplane mode in the pocket is acceptable. The phone with the earbuds in, playing a podcast, is the opposite of the walk. The podcast is another person's thoughts. You came out to have your own.

The second is that you do not look at the route. You have a route. You have walked it before. The route becomes wallpaper, which is exactly what you want it to be. A route that demands attention demands the wrong kind of attention. Pick a loop you know.

The third is that you walk longer than you think you should. Twenty minutes is a stretch. Forty minutes is the start of the actual walk. The first quarter is the mind clearing its throat. The middle is where the thinking happens. The last quarter is where the thought becomes a sentence you could write down.

What kinds of thinking? The kind that has been stuck for days. The decision you have been turning over. The question of what to say to the friend you have been avoiding. The shape of the next chapter. The walk does not produce new information. It rearranges the information you already had into a configuration you can use.

When the sentence arrives, you can stop and write it on your phone. This is the only sanctioned phone use. A single sentence, then back to walking. Do not check anything else while you have the screen open. The thought is fragile in its first minute outside the head; any other input will scatter it.

Walks are not exercise, and they are not transit. They are a working method that pretends to be neither. The people who walk in this way will tell you, when pressed, that the most important problems of their lives were solved between minute thirty and minute sixty of a walk that had no destination. The chair never produced anything similar.

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The walk also produces a different kind of editing. At the desk, editing is a search-and-replace activity. A sentence is wrong, a sentence is moved, a sentence is cut. The walk does editing differently. The sentences arrive in a slightly different order than the order you sat down with, and the new order is almost always better. The walk knows things about your argument that you do not know while you are typing.

Length matters. A ten-minute walk clears a small thought. A forty-minute walk produces a small essay. A two-hour walk tends to produce a decision, and the decision is often the one you had been avoiding while sitting still. Long walks should be undertaken honestly. Do not take a problem on a long walk if you are not prepared to come back from the walk having to do something about it.

Route matters less than people think. The same route, walked regularly, becomes a kind of cognitive co-author. The mind stops paying attention to the route and pays attention to the argument. A new route, by contrast, is good for the kind of thinking that wants to be lateral. The brain spends some of its bandwidth navigating, and the navigation seems to free the rest of the brain to make connections it would not make in a familiar hallway.

Carry a small notebook only if you can resist consulting it. The note that wants to be written will write itself when you get home; the note that has to be written down to be remembered is usually not the note worth writing. The walk is not a meeting with yourself. It is a meeting with the part of yourself that does not show up at meetings.

Build at least one weekly walk into the calendar as you would a meeting. Defend it the same way. Treat the walk as productive time, because it is, although the productivity is invisible from outside. The walk that gets moved off the calendar twice in a row tends not to happen again for months. The walk that survives the calendar for a year becomes part of the small body of habits that the year is built on. The mornings will get colder, the afternoons hotter, the evenings shorter, then longer again, and the walk will pick up small variations from each weather, each season, each year of your life. After ten years of weekly walking the same route, the walk is no longer a tool for thinking. It is a small autobiography in footsteps, written, weekly, against the same trees, the same lampposts, the same patch of sky over the same curve in the road.

End the walk slightly before the body wants you to. The small reserve preserved at the end is the part that brings you back tomorrow. Walks that exhaust the body produce a small reluctance the next morning. Walks that leave a little energy unspent produce a small eagerness. Energy preserved is the discipline of the long-term walker. Most good practices, watched honestly, share this property: end before the end, and the practice will keep being available to you for decades rather than months.