Walk & Talk
Solvitur ambulando — it is solved by walking.
Aristotle taught while walking. His school was called the Peripatetics — "those who walk about." I always assumed this was incidental, a quirk, like how some professors prefer chalkboards. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
Darwin had a gravel path at Down House he called his "sandwalk." He'd circle it daily, dropping stones to count laps while working through problems. Natural selection was figured out on that path. Nietzsche claimed all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking. Beethoven carried a sketchbook through the Vienna woods. Steve Jobs famously held walking meetings when something mattered. Kierkegaard paced Copenhagen for hours, working through his philosophy. He's remembered as a writer. He was a walker first.
This is a strange list. These people have almost nothing in common. Yet they all converged on the same practice.
The pattern seems to be too consistent to be a coincidence.
Paul Graham walks the same route repeatedly. He told Tyler Cowen: walking a familiar path frees the mind.
This might explain why sitting at a desk feels so different. At a desk, you're trying to think. Walking, you're just walking, and thinking happens as a side effect. The cognitive load of locomotion is high enough to occupy your surface mind, but low enough that the depths can move freely. It's like how you remember a word the moment you stop trying to remember it.
There's something else I didn't expect. When you walk with someone, you're side by side, facing the same direction. You're not staring at each other. Difficult conversations become easier this way — you can say things while walking that would turn into arguments at a table.
Pascal wrote that all of man's troubles arise because he cannot sit quietly in a room. I used to read this as advice to sit quietly. But maybe the real insight is about why we can't. The mind needs movement. Walking is the escape from that room, but into a different kind of attention.
The phone can't come. I tried leaving it in my pocket on silent. It doesn't work. Even there, it's a weight of potential interruption. The first walks without it feel wrong. You've been so constantly available that solitude registers as error.
Why should any of this work? I don't fully understand it. The fact that Aristotle figured it out 2,400 years ago and it still holds suggests it's something deep — something about how minds work that we've mostly forgotten.
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