On Writing While Walking (or Walking While Writing?)

A SJHS adventure

It’s been a while since I’ve updated you on the progress of The Spiritual Journey of Homo Sapiens. I had a couple of weeks where other things were clamoring for my attention and I didn’t get to sit in front of the computer very much… and there were a couple other weeks where I sat in front of the computer and not much happened. Such is the writing life.

You’d think that writing this section about walking would be straightforward. You just… put one sentence in front of the other. But like some of the walks I’ve been on, it had trouble staying on the path. I’ve now finished a draft, and am a bit surprised with where it ended up. The last chapter covered: a mystical experience I had at a monastery, elephants taking pilgrimages to visit their dead relatives, and some discussion of whether psychedelics are a shortcut to spiritual maturity. I think these topics hang together OK as the culmination what bipedalism has done for our species. I probably need to let it sit and simmer a bit though.

The writing of this Part also took longer because what I was learning and writing kept inspiring me to stop writing and go for a walk. I’d type a few paragraphs about how humans evolved for bipedal endurance, or how walking boosts creativity by 60%, and suddenly I’d find myself lacing up the hiking shoes and heading outside (the nicer weather has helped with this too). Eventually, though, I found another solution: that 60% creativity boost from walking (yes, there’s an actual Stanford study) shows that it doesn’t matter whether you walk outside or inside on a treadmill… so… I bought a treadmill that slides under my standing desk. Now I can pace along at a couple miles per hour while writing. Perhaps it’s just the placebo effect, but I think that when my feet are moving, my brain starts sorting out ideas that were previously stuck in writer’s block.

My mobile writing setup (which actually stays in the same place).

Writing about walking also forced me to confront my complicated relationship with running. I used to run marathons—slowly and with a lot of carbohydrate bribery—and I always thought walking was just running’s disappointing cousin. But walking the Camino de Santiago with my wife during the post-COVID travel thaw rewired something in me. It wasn’t about getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible anymore. Walking became the point. The rhythm, the scenery, the conversations, even the blisters—they did something to my soul (and soles).

That’s what this section of my book explores. Walking, especially when it’s intentional, changes us. It shapes our thoughts. Some of what I write about is deeply rooted in evolutionary history, e.g., how standing up reshaped our skeletons and repurposed our anatomy in ways we’re still getting used to (just ask your bunions or lower back). But walking also reshaped our communities. It set the stage for cooperation, persistence hunting, and eventually the internet. Our feet gave us freedom. And then our freed-up hands built tools, wrote poetry, and allowed our species to walk out of Africa (at least some of us) and inhabit every corner of Earth, and in an evolutionary blink of the eye, walk on the moon.

There’s no denying the technological progress. Has there also been moral progress? That’s trickier to measure, but again I’d say yes. The circle of our moral concern has grown. Present day events show all too well that there is a lot more room for growth in that department — our spiritual journey is not over.

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Writing this part of the book gave me the excuse to read some absolutely delightful books about bipedalism and walking (with a few on running still hanging on). Here’s my bibliography for this chapter:

• Michael Austin (ed.), Running & Philosophy

• Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

• Jeremy DeSilva, First Steps: How Upright Walking Made us Human

• Charles Foster, The Sacred Journey

• Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

• Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies

• Erling Kagge, Walking: One Step at a Time

• Robert McFarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

• Christopher McDougall, Born to Run

• Colin McGinn, Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity

• Duncan Minshull, Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking

• Tim Moore, Spanish Steps: Travels with my Donkey

• Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

• Shane O’Mara, In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration

• Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

• Chip Walter, Thumbs, Toes, and Tears (and other traits that make us human)

Or if you prefer visuals, here’s the stack (minus the book by McGinn which I seem to have lost… please let me know if you find a copy somewhere — preferably with the same notes and markings I made in mine!):

In assembling this tower of books on my treadmill, I notice a pattern that authors whose last names are lower in the alphabet tend to produce smaller books, making the stack a bit unstable.

Lest you get the wrong idea, it’s not like I read all these books cover-to-cover in the last two months. In fact, I’ve only ever read seven of them cover-to-cover. But I have dipped into them all in recent weeks to learn something, to find a quote, or just to be inspired.

It’s kind of remarkable to me that the process of writing a book is basically to take a stack of books like this, throw in some of your own experiences, and produce a bunch of your own words on the topic. (I suspect the “throw in some of your own experiences” is the last advantage we have in book writing over large language models like ChatGPT.)

Here’s one of my favorite quotes on walking, from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking:

“I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness” (p. 10).

Too many of the decision makers in our world are moving faster than the speed of thoughtfulness. We would all do well to slow down a bit.

I’m getting ready to assemble a new stack of books for the next section of the book, which is on thinking. I’ll let you know what I think about thinking once I’ve thought about it a bit more.

In the meantime, go take a walk.