wisdom-walks

I’ve been carrying a small psychogeographic instruction around …

I’ve been carrying a small psychogeographic instruction around with me: unfold a map, put a glass down anywhere, draw round its rim, then go out and walk the circle as closely as the streets allow. This is a low tech version of the deríve app I made last week.

It’s a lovely bit of mischief because it gives the walk a rule without getting to complicated. The line is arbitrary, yet the body has to negotiate it: the cul-de-sac, the dual carriageway, the bit of private land, the pub garden, the place where the tidy circle becomes a long awkward detour. The map makes a proposition, and the street answers back.

Robert Macfarlane’s version says to record the “textual run-off” as you go: graffiti, branded litter, snatches of conversation, visual rhymes, whatever keeps catching on the mind. A walk doesn’t need a grand revelation to become material. It only needs attention and a way of catching what sticks to it.

I like that the instruction ends with the circle and the record ending together. There’s a discipline in it. You don’t have to turn every walk into a project, a lesson, or a little performance for the screen. You walk the strange line you drew, make a few marks, and come home with whatever the streets were prepared to give you.

Maybe that’s enough. A route, a notebook, a few scraps of the world.

With thanks to Robert Macfarlane, “A Road of One’s Own.”

Thinking with my feet I have started calling …

Thinking with my feet

I have started calling them Wisdom Walks, which sounds a little grand for what usually begins with me putting on my shoes and trying to get out of the house before I disappear too far into the screen.

But the name has earned its keep. I go walking when something in me has become stuck: a question about work, a snag in a piece of writing, a feeling I have been carrying round without properly looking at it. I don’t go out with a plan to solve it. I take it with me and see what happens once it has to travel alongside the rest of life.

There’s a difference between sitting at a desk and trying to think your way through a problem and walking with it for an hour. At the desk, I can become a small committee meeting in my own head. I revisit the same argument, polish the same worry, and call it inquiry. On the road, the question has to make room for traffic, dogs, the weight of my rucksack, somebody mowing a lawn, and the stiffness in my legs on a hill. The world keeps interrupting. I think that is part of the point.

Walking puts a question back into proportion. It gets it out of the little sealed room behind my eyes. It does not make the question disappear, but it lets me come alongside it rather than stare at it from six inches away.

Some of my favourite philosophers were keen walkers. Thoreau made walking a way of refusing the narrowness of town life and other people’s expectations. Rousseau used his walks for memory, solitude, and self-examination. Nietzsche claimed that all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking. I do not need to borrow their coats to see the truth in it. A thought changes when the body has to carry it.

That is the bit I keep coming back to. I think better on the move because movement is not just the backdrop to the thinking. It is part of the apparatus. The rhythm of the feet, the changing ground, the simple fact of having somewhere to go: all of it gives the mind another way to work. Ideas arrive sideways. An old memory turns up because I pass a particular street. A sentence I could not finish at the desk finds its last few words when I am crossing the road.

Not every walk gives me a revelation. Some walks leave me with tired feet and less static in my head. That is enough. I do not want to turn walking into another self-improvement project with targets and outcomes. Sometimes the walk is simply a way of letting the mind compost. Sometimes it gives me a line for the notebook. Sometimes it shows me that I have been asking the wrong question.

For me, a Wisdom Walk is self-inquiry with the doors open. I take a question out into the world, let the road and the body have their say, and wait to see if a truer sentence catches up with me.