wisdom-walks

There is a walk I take where I …

There is a walk I take where I stop knowing, somewhere past the second field, whether I chose the route or the route chose me. My feet just kept turning left. And for a while I told myself a story about wanting the long way round, the light on the hedgerows, all of that — when the honest version is I wasn’t deciding anything. I was being carried, and narrating it afterwards as though I’d held the wheel.

That’s the thing I keep circling. Not wandering itself. Wandering is fine. I’m a great believer in the long way round. The problem is the pretending — the little voice behind my eyes that dresses up a current as a decision, so I never have to feel how much of my day just happens to me.

Because there are two kinds of not-knowing-where-you’re-going, and they feel almost identical from the inside, which is what makes it slippery.

One is being moved by something you haven’t noticed — an old habit, a mood you didn’t catch, someone else’s pull on you — while telling yourself a tidy story about why. You mistake the current for your own swimming. You end up somewhere and can’t honestly say how, only that you have a nice explanation ready.

The other is feeling the pull, naming it, and going anyway. Curious. Boots off. You still don’t know where it leads. But it’s yours.

Same footpath. Completely different animal.

What I don’t trust is the idea that the fix is more self-knowledge, more explaining. I’ve met the version of me that can name every pattern — this is my avoidance, this is the father thing, this is the one where I go quiet — and names them so fluently that the naming quietly replaces the changing. A very sophisticated way of keeping your shoes on. You become a brilliant curator of a life you’re not actually walking through.

So the test can’t be how well I explain myself. It has to be whether the next step lands any differently. Whether, having felt the left turn coming, I take it with my eyes open instead of asleep.

I don’t have this sorted. I noticed it this morning and it’s still there in the grass, undecided, watching me write about it as if writing about it counted as walking.

The air has changed. I almost don’t want …

The air has changed.

I almost don’t want to say it out loud, as if naming it might hurry things along, but there was a trace of winter under the morning. It wasn’t cold. The air had acquired an edge, just enough to remind me that the year is already leaning towards another season. Where did the summer go?

Weathered stone ruins and bare branches beneath a heavy grey sky, with dry grass in the foreground.

Thinking often changes like this. I keep circling a question, carrying it from the desk to the path and back again, until one morning I realise I am no longer asking it from the same place.

For the past week the question has been: What is my practice?

The useful version of that question reaches beneath my work, my products and whatever skills I can put on a page. It asks what I am cultivating day after day, whether anybody notices or not.

The internet muddies the answer. I understand the marketplace and its machinery. If I want people to find my work, I have to make it visible. The platforms reward recognisable openings, familiar pacing and proven formats. Success leaves footprints, and the rest of us follow them until even originality begins to look as though it came from a template.

Every time I start thinking too strategically about “content”, I feel my attention detach from the thing that made me want to write. I start positioning rather than wondering. I ask, Will this perform? before I ask, Is this true?

These morning walks have been teaching me another rhythm. Walking, talking aloud, letting a thought find its pace somewhere between footstep and breath. I rarely leave the house with a destination for the thinking. The walk is the thinking. By the time I return, I know something I couldn’t reach by sitting still and pressing harder on the question.

July’s thirty-one days of blogging did something similar. It began as a challenge, became a habit, then asked to be treated as a practice. A challenge has a finish line. A habit can run without much presence. A practice asks me to turn up and meet the day that is here, with whatever quality of attention I can bring to it.

The Textual Underground has been holding versions of this thought for a while. On one walk, i uncovered a useful sequence: walk, notice, record, return, write, publish a trace. Another note asked what particular world becomes available through a person’s attention. Beneath both sits the same suspicion: the work begins before the writing does.

The blog has become the public edge of that practice. It can hold a finished essay, but it can also hold a photograph, a rough connection, a sentence that hasn’t decided what it believes yet. I don’t want it to document a row of conclusions. I want it to show a consciousness moving through time, books, streets, conversations and its own recurring questions, sometimes changing its mind in public.

Attention may be the thing I am cultivating. Attention to the year turning in the air. To old stone under a heavy sky. To the conversations overheard in cafés and the books that keep talking after I have closed them. To the odd thought that arrives halfway up a hill and refuses to leave me alone.

Writing is what attention leaves behind.

The business may grow from those traces. Readers may gather around them. Some notes may become essays, workshops, books or objects I can’t see yet. But those are later forms. If I make them the source, I lose contact with the walk, the question and the part of me that still writes to discover what he thinks.

Tomorrow the air may feel ordinary again.

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.