http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/how-walking-fosters-creativity.html)
"Many
a poet and teacher has preferred the ambulatory method," Jones writes, to
produce the meditative tradition's goal of mindfulness. Aristotle's school in
ancient Athens was given the name "peripatetic" because (legend has it) he preferred
walking while delivering lectures on, say, physical science, metaphysics,
politics, ethics, poetics, cosmology and all those other subjects on which his
teachings were long considered the last word until about the time of, say,
Galileo. Of course, all that talking while walking might have made it a little
hard on students trying to take notes. Our main sources for Aristotle's
philosophy are (in fact) believed to be students' lecture notes.
Among other thinking-walkers, Nietzsche is
quoted as saying that walking is “the best way to go more slowly than any
other method that has ever been found.”
Other
candidates for the school of walking: Thoreau (who walked straight from Concord
to Cape Cod, stopping in Plymouth where he almost drowned trying to walk across
Duxbury Bay at low tide), the poet Rimbaud, the noble-savage philosopher
Rousseau, the clockwork philosopher Immanuel Kant, who left his house at
exactly the same moment every day for the identical stroll.
Another take on creative walkers comes from a
book titled "Wanderlust: A History of Walking"
by Rebecca Solnit, who examined the role of walking in the lives of real and
fictional persons such as the poet Wordsworth who hiked all over England and
Scotland (sometimes accompanied by fellow 'Romantic' poet Coleridge), Jane
Austen's fascinating independent thinker Elizabeth Bennett, and the 20th century
zen-influenced American poet Gary Snyder.
Ah, if only
the legs were as young as they once were.
Solitary
walking in natural or 'wild' spaces was in fact the only sure release from the
miserable, negative thought patterns that visited me in certain difficult,
unhappy periods of ill spent youth. The best place for a walk was the most
remote place one could reach. Since I was living in New England, remote was at
best a relative term, but getting lost in a stretch of woods where you were
unlikely to run into anyone at all for a good piece of time, released whatever
agitated spirits, happy or sad, that needed to get out. I'm making this sounds more
therapeutic, I know, than creative, but for me these solitary exercises in locomotion were where
the poems and the stories got started. The desk time would come later. You
needed to release the pent-up spirits first. You need to get the mind and the body (the
mind-body, perhaps) going.
My walks
are way more modest these later days. I live in a city. I initiate a nature walk by
starting the car. Increasingly a creature of habit (Immanuel Kant's 6 p.m.
outings don't seem so pathetic to me any more), I drive the few minutes to a
salt marsh graced with a hillock and some tame woods, and maintained by the
city just enough to keep a "nature walk" footpath open.
The footpath through the marsh is a short
walk through a place impossible to get lost in. Sometimes I run into another human, almost
always accompanied by a dog. But for a little while I'm breathing air
sluiced by the elements. Sky, water, vegetation, decay, renewal. Sometimes I
meet a hawk. Occasionally a great blue heron pops up out of nowhere.
At the
end of it I drove home and go back to whatever I was doing. But I am always a
little different -- a little aired out, pumped up, cleaned out, mentally re-set
from the outdoor experience. What's good for the body is good for the mind.
Recently I've been
coming back, slowly, from a surgery that proved more complicated than anticipated. The weather's been a typically raw, unstable,
changeable, teasing March; promising something, delivering less. It almost
always feels too cold to go for a walk.
But I
have to get myself going again. It's time to go back to those walks. 
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