Note well: This is a continuation of the post, “Walking School,” which was initially one long post in response to a friend’s comment. I broke the post into shorter pieces so you needn’t read it all at once.
“Walking School,” continued:
If there is something about walking outside that helps you solve intractable problems — such as ones that you fabricate in your novel, for instance, or relationship problems that depress both your spirits and your desire to write anything, or some heavy, fecal turn of events that clouds your ability to see the meaningful ways available to you to reinvigorate your life — then it’s important you get in on this.
I see it two ways… sometimes you need a rest from all your abstract cerebral activity and walking provides that chance for your mind to work at an unconscious level. You’ve thought and thought so hard about your problem that your brain needs a rest to work it out for you… Have you ever had fresh insight or improved ability to do something upon waking up fresh in the morning?
Although I’m not often fresh when I wake up in the morning — rather groggy before splashing water on my face, actually — but I hear some people are indeed fresh. The rest of the people use coffee. Coffee, a vengeful deity when scorned, apt to cast comparable symptoms to early trypanosomiasis, the dread sleeping sickness. But so dark, aromatic and lovely…
The other way is that what you see and feel outside provides a gift. Perhaps a wild animal. I say gift because communing with wild animals is something you could never experience in a temperature-controlled building. Or maybe you do. But outside, the wild animals can run away if they want to. And so can you.
Inside, almost everything we can see without the aid of microscopes is designed by us. Besides potted plants and cockroaches. Yet I truly believe that there are infinitely many combinations of things in our world that we have neither designed nor yet imagined.
There was a time in my life when I became nervous that everything I experienced was a dream. I felt like I was floating in a video game. Perhaps the best remedy for this was what eventually happened: I went swimming in the ocean and was thrown onto the sand by a large wave that I half swallowed into my lungs, retching painfully, my chest burning horribly from the half-breathed, half-ingested salt water. There is nothing like getting schooled by a wave, where you utterly lose control of your limbs, to teach you that there are other important forces beyond us. I think we’ve evolved muscles and minds to help us survive these forces, and they don’t get enough exercise in thoroughly planned out environments such as buildings or houses. Not just the muscles but the minds too.
Spending time outside and traveling has shown me creatures like the indri, which I know that I could not have imagined before sensing, even by way of a chimerical assemblage of everything I’d experienced until then. I know you can’t entirely discount a bunch of parts coming together to produce a whole with entirely new properties, but even so, I felt viscerally: here is something I couldn’t have dreamed up.
I must disagree with Nietzsche. Only thoughts which come from climbing, swimming, or flying, in addition to walking, have value. I am sure that Stephen Hawking flies when the rest of us are asleep.
I think some people are more content with living inside or underground than others. But even for them it is important at least to dig in the dirt with their hands, smelling the soil. Not walking surely impairs your ability to walk well. Just look at the tracks of a lap dog when it finally gets a chance to walk outside. The register is dramatically off, compared to a wolf and even other dogs that get more exercise.
What does this prove? Nothing. But it suggests that animals, including humans, which walk more walk better. There is a greater regularity and efficiency to their step. I’d hazard to say even: a grace of motion. And I’d hazard to say that sometimes, this grace carries its way all the way through the movement of your metatarsals, your increasingly shapely legs, and into your metaphysics. That is, your mind.