In a beautiful letter to his sister-in-law, who was often bedridden,
and depressed as a result, Kierkegaard wrote of the importance of
walking. “Above all,” he told her in 1847, “do not lose your desire to
walk: Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk
away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts,
and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away
from it.”
Kierkegaard believed that sitting still was a kind of breeding
ground for illness. But walking, movement, to him was almost
sacred. It cleansed the soul and cleared the mind in a way that
primed his explorations as a philosopher. Life is a path, he liked to
say, we have to walk it.
And while Kierkegaard was particularly eloquent in his writing
about walking, he was by no means alone in his dedication to the
practice—nor alone in reaping the benefits. Nietzsche said that the
ideas in Thus Spoke Zarathustra came to him on a long walk. Nikola
Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field, one of the most
important scientific discoveries of all time, on a walk through a city
park in Budapest in 1882. When he lived in Paris, Ernest Hemingway
would take long walks along the quais whenever he was stuck in his
writing and needed to clarify his thinking. Charles Darwin’s daily
schedule included several walks, as did those of Steve Jobs and the
groundbreaking psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman,
the latter of whom wrote that “I did the best thinking of my life on
leisurely walks with Amos.” It was the physical activity in the body,
Kahneman said, that got his brain going.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was a seminary student at Crozer,
he took an hour walk each day through the campus woods to
“commune with nature.” Walt Whitman and Ulysses S. Grant often
bumped into each other on their respective walks around
Washington, which cleared their minds and helped them think.
Perhaps it was that experience that Whitman was writing about in
this verse of “Song of Myself”:
Know’st thou the joys of pensive thought?
Joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy heart?