Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

Where are they now? What did they believe? What problems did they
have?
When you feel the tug of your responsibilities or the desire to
check in with the outside world, push yourself a bit further. If you’re
on a path you have trod before, take a sudden turn down a street or
up a hill where you haven’t been before. Feel the unfamiliarity and
the newness of these surroundings, drink in what you have not yet
tasted.
Get lost. Be unreachable. Go slowly.
It’s an affordable luxury available to us all. Even the poorest
pauper can go for a nice walk—in a national park or an empty
parking lot.
This isn’t about burning calories or getting your heart rate up. On
the contrary, it’s not about anything. It is instead just a
manifestation, an embodiment of the concepts of presence, of
detachment, of emptying the mind, of noticing and appreciating the
beauty of the world around you. Walk away from the thoughts that
need to be walked away from; walk toward the ones that have now
appeared.
On a good walk, the mind is not completely blank. It can’t be—
otherwise you might trip over a root or get hit by a car or a bicyclist.
The point is not, as in traditional meditation, to push every thought
or observation from your mind. On the contrary, the whole point is
to see what’s around you. The mind might be active while you do
this, but it is still. It’s a different kind of thinking, a healthier kind if
you do it right. A study at New Mexico Highlands University has
found that the force from our footsteps can increase the supply of
blood to the brain. Researchers at Stanford have found that walkers
perform better on tests that measure “creative divergent thinking”
during and after their walks. A study out of Duke University found a
version of what Kierkegaard tried to tell his sister-in-law, that
walking could be as effective a treatment for major depression in
some patients as medication.
The poet William Wordsworth walked as many as 180,000 miles
in his lifetime—an average of six and a half miles a day since he was
five years old! He did much of his writing while walking, usually
around Grasmere, a lake in the English countryside, or Rydal Water,