Writing in the Stream

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.

When my mother was a young girl in elementary school, the principal took her aside and said, “please come to my office during your break.” He then offered to give her walking lessons. She was mortified and immediately agreed to take lessons. It sounded awfully strange to me, but then again I never saw my mother walk before she had walking lessons. In any case, she walks perfectly normally now. Sometimes she walks rather loudly but that’s my only complaint.

Nobody can deny that walking is important. For getting from point A to point B, it sure beats running backwards, crawling, or throwing yourself to the ground repeatedly as a sign of adoring submission to the feet of a hated despot. Do you ever feel you must walk that way with your boss? I hope not.

I write tonight to examine a response from a friend to my post about the harm of spending lots of time indoors. He said that at first he thought it was a silly notion, but then “reconsidered” (the quotes are my own, to be explained in a moment). He reconsidered in part, he said, because of a book he’s reading. But also because when he was walking in the hills like his distant ancestor used to do, something remarkable happened.

But first, more about his ancestor. His ancestor would climb trees during raging storms for the sheer ecstatic joy of being alive and buffeted in the top of a swaying Douglas fir. Most other things paled to the magnificent force of Nature.

Anyhow, with this context, when my friend was walking in the hills recently, he encountered some wild animals. And sometime during his whole experience, the solution to a problem came to him — a problem that had seemed “intractable” to his lab. Now, I know my friend well enough to know that, like his Scottish ancestor, he certainly greatly values wild places. He doesn’t need much convincing of their importance, which is why I put “reconsidered” in quotation marks, in homage to his ancestor and his personal background as a National Park ranger. But he did raise an interesting question of whether it is actually important for the mind to get outside. And additionally, if it’s more important to some than to others.

This is relevant to your writing, by the way. I met a writer this summer who would take his dog for a five mile walk along the beach and then he would write. Never mind that he was writing a book about walking! Although he didn’t say it, I think it helped him clear his head and focus. Which was important to do BEFORE writing.

Walking School: Lesson #1

She stood right in front of me expectantly, saying nothing. I didn’t know what to say!

I was sitting, she was standing, and the top of her head was about level with my chest. We were in the family kitchen, surrounded by activity. The brother coloring, the father’s girlfriend cooking dinner, the Grandmother laughing and showing off Halloween pictures of the evil ventriloquist doll she’d posed by the father’s bed to terrify him when he woke up in the morning.

The young girl stood right in front of me expectantly, saying nothing. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked her if she’d like to learn how to whistle with her hands.

“No,” she said, and smiled.

So, for my own amusement, I cupped my hands together, and blew. At first nothing, then a sound like a morning dove, or an owl. After that, I changed the position of my hands, and made a more high-pitched whistling sound.

These were the memories I had of my grandfather — the loggers sawing wood, the congregation in the church, and the whistles he could make, all with his hands. She smiled again, and her brother looked over, fascinated.

Next time you don’t know what to say, is there some gesture you can make? Can you instead sing, or whistle? Can you simply do nothing at all? What if you were to take a piece of paper, and fold it into a crane, a cup, a hat, a giraffe?

Sometimes in prose too you may be at a loss for words.

This does not have to be a bad thing, at all. When can you replace words with a gesture?