Walking is Thinking
& a live event in NYC
Hi everyone. I went for a windy walk over two bridges through a small hail storm to try and clear my head and get my ideas in order to finish my every-other-Wednesday post, but it’s not going to happen.
I really wanted to send a piece that has been in my drafts for months, the one about language i’ve been working on, but that post needs more time and energy than I have to give it this eve. (Yes, I know it’s just a blog post, but…)
So I’m sending this short piece in praise of walking instead.
Walking is one of my favorite activities.
Walking has saved me and thrilled me and brought me to my senses on so many occasions and in so many cities and countries and on so many dark nights and sunny mornings and over so many years that I sometimes think walking is the real writing, the real philosophy, the rawest communication I can give.
Walking deserves many blog posts of gratitude.
Because walking is thinking.
And walking can be done in full communication, without words.
I walk to become what I am walking through. I notice where I am walking and after a time, I no longer need the inner dialogue; I am thinking as walking.
In those lucky moments, thinking is putting one foot in front of the other, breathing and sensing the world as communication. I am present and attentive. The walking is all the thinking I need, the feel of the earth on soles and souls, the rhythm of the wind; I am becoming what the leaves already know.
After crawling, walking is the first mode of thinking we experience, the one that gives the body its groove. No wonder so many early philosophers were Peripatetics; walking came first, and talking developed within those moves.
Reveries are first movement. Later, we place words together to try and feel back in, to try and express and give our movements to others.
Walking is not about ‘getting ideas’ or thinking through sentences; it is about getting oneself into a particular full bodied attention, where joy and grief are only the surface of a calm ecstasy. Where the body locks in as its movement, and its movement is also what it is moving through and what it is moving with and what moves it. The communication is so deep that one can forget words exist. Have you ever felt this? Or does walking do something else for you?
For me, walking is attention and responsiveness. It is the knowing that is going with, meshing senses and letting the lines of self vibrate beyond bounds.
When I am in this state, it makes sense to think of weather as another form of knowing. As Tim Ingold writes:
“Making their way along the ground, people create paths and tracks. These are made, however, through the impression of footprints rather than gestural inscription. As footprints are made in soft ground rather than stamped on a hard surface, their temporality is bound to the dynamics of its formation. These dynamics are a function of the weather, and of reactions across the interface between earth and air. Breathing with every step they take, wayfarers walk at once in the air and on the ground. This walking is itself a process of thinking and knowing. Thus knowledge is formed along paths of movement in the weather-world.”
Walking is an instrument in the songlines that started long before these bodies came. Care is the ground. As Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust, walking is “how the body measures itself against the earth” but it is also how we know ourselves as that earth. One of my favorite poems, one I can still hear in the voice of Wallace Stevens, goes:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
We walk to care for ourselves and to come into ourselves again, and to be in love with what is strange. Many of us walk so as to shift out of what we cannot bear. As Annabel Abbs writes of Simone de Beauvoir in Windswept:
Her walks were plotted with military precision. She taught herself to map-read and navigate, meticulously planning every route. They became “expeditions,” each one “a work of art in itself.” Beauvoir devotes pages of her memoir to these “fanatical walking trips,” explaining that they preserved her “from boredom, regret, and several sorts of depression.” Time in nature, she added, gave her a “greater familiarity with myself.”
(Read this full piece on Simone de Beauvoir and walking in the Paris Review).
Walking is greater familiarity with ourselves and with nature and with the idea that self and nature are not different things. Walking is how I have ended this evening and will now end this short piece. But first I want to extend an invitation to walk with me in NYC: If you happen to be in the city in April, walk over to the Quad and say hello on the 11th. Details here and below.
“Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within...By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.”
― Paul Auster, City of Glass
If you’re in New York City, I’d love to see you at one of my favorite places, Quad Cinema, where I’ll have the honor of speaking on a panel with one of my favorite documentary filmmakers, Sophie Fiennes and where you can be among the first to watch the US premiere of her film Acting. I will post more about that soon, but if you’re interested, you can already get your tickets here.
Love & Philosophy has also started a new season. Sign up there for new episodes at at the Love and Philosophy newsletter. The latest is with philosopher Janet Levin (University of Southern California).
Have a good walk, and ❤️ goodnight.
Love, Andrea
I meant to say here that rolling is also what I mean by walking. Or however one makes way. When writing this I was thinking of my neighbor, for example, who often makes the same walking loop I do on the paved path by the water, and does it with a wheelchair. His presence is the kind of feeling of this piece
OMNG - ask any of our kids and they will tell you I have told them since little - WALK - angels whisper to you when you walk.. it is the one time you talk to the universe in every way - through your step - breath - body language - even out loud sometimes! it is truly one of the simplest smallest yet enormous gifts we can ever gift ourselves!!!