Our attention is freed as we walk—it doesn’t take a conscious effort to just walk—and innovative ideas or insights come to our minds that give us insight into things.
In Vogue’s Christmas 1969 issue, Vladimir Nabokov shared advice on how to teach James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense that educators spout when trying to interpret chapter titles as Homeric, chromatic, and referring to inner content, of these chapters – they would have been better off stocking up on maps of Dublin, where the points of intersection of the routes of Bloom and Stephen could be clearly traced.
One touching version of such a map was drawn by Nabokov himself. A few decades later, Joseph Nugent, an English teacher at Boston College, and colleagues created a Google map that, step by step, with comments, marked all the movements of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. And the British Society of Virginia Woolf Admirers and students of the Technological Institute from Georgia (USA) reconstructed the movements of the heroes of the novel “Miss Dalloway” in London in the same way.
Such maps clarify the connection between our consciousness and walking, on which the content of the book depends. Both Joyce and Wolfe belong to the category of writers who were able to masterfully transfer the rapid stream of consciousness to paper. To do this, they sent their heroes to walk around the city. When Miss Dalloway walks around London, she almost does not notice the city around her – rather, she plunges into the past and emerges into reality, turning the London landscape into a relief, patterned landscape of her thoughts (“constantly composing, building, breaking, building again every second”).
A deep connection between walking and thinking was noticed by Aristotle. The name of his philosophical school (from ancient Greek περιπατέω – “to walk, walk”) arose because of the philosopher’s habit of walking with his students while lecturing. Many writers have intuitively understood at some point that walking helps you think and write better. “I start walking, and thoughts come to my head,” wrote the American writer Henry David Thoreau in his diary. The English writer Thomas de Quincey calculated that his compatriot, the romantic poet William Wordsworth, whose poems are full of descriptions of wanderings through mountains and forests, walked at least 112 thousand kilometers in his life. On average, every day he walked about 10 km, and from the age of five.
How does walking help us think and put our thoughts on paper better? The answer is simple: our biochemistry is changing. On a walk, the heart pumps blood more actively, it circulates faster, and more oxygen is supplied not only to our muscles, but also to all other organs, including the brain. Scientific studies have confirmed that even after a little physical activity, we successfully pass tests for memory and attention. Regular walks also stimulate the formation of new neural connections between brain cells, slow down aging, increase the size of the hippocampus (this part of the brain plays a key role in memorization).
In addition, the very nature of our movements affects our thoughts, and vice versa. Many have probably noticed: fast music makes us move faster, and the faster we move, the faster music we prefer.
When we walk at our own pace, our movements are in tune with our inner mood and our inner speech. We can change the course of our thoughts by purposely speeding up or slowing down, which is not so easy to achieve if we work out in the gym, drive a car, ride a bicycle, or use any other mode of transport.
Our attention on the walk is freed – after all, we do not have to make special conscious efforts to just walk, our gaze freely wanders through the opening pictures of the surrounding reality, which in turn are superimposed on the chain of images in our minds. It is in this state that, according to research, innovative ideas or insights come to mind, giving us the opportunity to penetrate the essence of things.
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True, if you need to focus on one subject – let’s say we are looking for a single correct answer to a question – walking is unlikely to help. As we walk, we let our consciousness float freely in the turbulent ocean of thoughts, and this seething will interfere with concentration.
The location of the walk also matters. Studies show that while walking in parks, gardens and forests, we restore our mental resources, but the city, on the contrary, depletes them. Our attention span is limited and gradually dwindles throughout the day. A crowded intersection full of pedestrians, cars and advertising billboards “takes away” our attention. A walk in the park along the lake is quite another matter. Our consciousness smoothly passes from one impression to another, we look at the ripples of water, listen to the rustling of leaves …
However, both country and city walks have their advantages. Walking around the city stimulates the brain faster – it gets more diverse sensations. Tired of them, you can always return to nature. Virginia Woolf wrote with delight in her diary of the creative energy of the London streets: “You are on the crest of the highest wave, in the midst of the flow of events.” But she also needed country walks through the South Downs, “so that there was room for the imagination to unfold.”
Returning to the desk after a walk, we realize that writing and walking are very similar skills that engage our mind and body in the same way. When choosing a route through the city or through the forest, we must assess the landscape, create a mental map, plot our path along it, and then translate this plan into a series of steps.
In the same way, writing causes the brain to see some landscape of its own, sketch out a path through this imaginary territory, and translate the result of these considerations into a movement of the hand. Walking organizes the space around us, writing organizes our thoughts.