How does walking help us to create and think?

"Walking, in the best of his condition, is the state in which the mind, body and world merge, as if they are three people who are finally talking, three miracles that have met, and suddenly, a broken piece of walking allows our bodies to be in the world without being preoccupied with it, giving us freedom to think without losing Completely within our thoughts ".

(Rebecca Solnet, History of Walking)

The moment we stood up, stood on our feet for the first time, then learned to put each foot in front of the other, took our first steps, and gave birth to one of the pleasures of life that would accompany us throughout our stay on this earth. It was a wonderful moment in which we learned to walk. Our small bodies freed from the restraints in one place, and our feet took us in all directions, following our overwhelming desire to explore, trying to satisfy our curiosity to see everything around us.

But days pass, and the bodies grow, to find that the chairs that require sitting on them during school hours, and then the offices that connect them and prevent them from moving during the working hours, inhibiting the desire to walk. The rhythm of life is taken away by the pleasure of the steps of the steps, and learning practical life to sanctify the minutes. You see in every action that does not contribute to increasing productivity, or returns to us with a direct benefit, a lost time. This perspective merges with the value of speed in today's life, negating the walk together into what is useless behind it.

Walking is so impractical, slower than the speed of life allows now, and to keep up with that speed, we have replaced our feet with cars, ensuring that we arrive as quickly as possible wherever we want, but waste our time from exploring the place. From a speeding car window, the horizon turns to a spot with unmarked features, into a spiral of transient shapes and colors. This is not the only thing we lose when we stop walking. There are simply many pleasures and other worlds that are opened to us when we leave the usual path, and go away from its monotonous pursuit of the interests of life. Every new way we walk away from our everyday and everyday orbit opens up a pathway to our souls, and our thoughts pave parallel paths within the mind. The widening of the traffic area widens the breath. Many thinkers, writers, and writers fought the journey that took them to other worlds, and to take a glimpse of those worlds and their fun, we will follow the traces of their progress.

Fun to walk without guidance

"My thoughts sleep when I sit for a long time; my imagination does not move alone as it does when my feet move"

French philosopher Michelle de Montagne

It is connected in our minds sit comfortably, and the movement is tired. But in fact it is not for the purpose of sitting designed our bodies, and she is not quite comfortable in that situation. These hundreds of muscles and joints are found in our bodies to make our movement more fluid, and when we tell them to sit for long hours above the offices or in the classrooms, we do more harm than good. [1]

For this reason, in our most simple movements, the movement of walking, our body rejoices. After a long silence for hours, he finally walks back to her vitality and takes her out of the narrow office space to the horizon. But not a walk that is capable of afflicting ourselves with the joy that our bodies feel. [2] The walk was not completely extinct. We are still walking, but we always walk in the orbit of something, we go to a destination to do something specific. That's what we can call "career walking." This kind of walking may give our bodies medical benefits, which is certainly better than sitting for long hours, but it is not that walk that would bring the stillness of our lives and our thoughts away from here and now.

"When I grew up, I was forced to work, commitments and loads to play the role of gentleman and move a wagon," says Rousseau. "Then I find my worries and troubles going with me. Instead of feeling the way I did before, My only goal is to reach my destination. " [3] Although Rousseau wrote these words in the eighteenth century, we still touch him so far. In our daily lives, we always go for purpose and purpose. We go out of the house to go somewhere for a purpose, then leave the place and go home. The road then is only a dead space, an obstacle between two points, we have to go to get what we want. These goals and those goals in turn weighs on us, our tension, and our distress. What if things were not done as we wanted? What if our plans deviate from their planned course?

Therefore, even before our minds and souls open the way to more spacious dimensions, we must first free us from the point and the goal; to get out of the house or office one day and walk only for the purpose of walking. At the time, there is no cause for concern. There is no plan. And then also, the road turns from that negative, obstructive space that delays our arrival to what we want to pleasure in itself. But when we leave the house or the office, we have to leave all the concerns and problems behind us as we close the door.

"I feel uneasy when I find myself walking in the woods with my body without my mind," says thinker and author Henry David Thoreau, "in an afternoon walk, I'm glad to forget all the morning's concerns and commitments, but sometimes I find it difficult to keep those thoughts away from Then I wonder, what can I do in the forest and my thoughts revolve around things outside. " [4] The first thing we set foot on the road and we left everything to walk only, our thoughts and feelings take a much different course from the one we see in office rooms or closed houses.

Think about the footsteps

"Low ceilings and small rooms suffocate spirit and mind"
Crime and punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

In our first step in the road, the soft morning sun light glows in the usual cold winter morning on cold industrial lighting, and the body feels refreshed when the gentle breeze blows away from the air of the closed, idle rooms. When we free our minds and bodies from the paths and places we have traveled so often, when we give our feet the freedom to walk wherever you want, our thoughts follow quickly. The voice of our steps becomes the rhythm of our thoughts, thoughts that differ greatly from those that came to us in the usual paths. As the ocean changes, the recovery envelops itself at the beginning, and along the way, that recovery becomes a restful state of contemplation of things with new eyes.

Writers, philosophers and poets such as Thoreau, Frederic Nietzsche and William Woodsworth used to walk long hours every day in nature. Even when the sister of the latter was asked about the location of her brother's office, she pointed to the horizon where greenery and trees were in their way. [5]

"Do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air while moving freely, sit down - I took it once and repeat it - is the biggest sin," says Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche's writings and the comments of Professor Frederick Gross in his Philosophy of Walking, only fresh ideas are those that are born outside the walls, where the extended horizon, where the body flows and flows thoughts in vitality and recovery. "We do not belong to those whose thoughts come only from books," Nietzsche says, "we are used to thinking outside, walking, hopping, climbing, dancing, and preferably in lonely mountains or near the sea. As witnesses ". Ideas that were not washed by the sun and were not surrounded by air breaths, ideas that were born from other ideas are just recycling, become an anatomy like the closed rooms that gave birth. [6]

This relationship between the footsteps and the ideas remains something that seems to be quite possible, inexplicable, perhaps if we depart from the language of rigid science. But Rebecca Solnett, in her book "The History of Walking," tries to formulate that interpretation by means of a thin metaphor in which she expresses the soft harmony between the two acts. "The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, where passage through space stimulates parallel paths through thoughts. A strange harmony between the inner and outer corridors, a harmony that indicates that the mind is also a kind of space, and that walking is a way of cutting that space, and the new idea seems to us like a teacher in that area. From a journey through which we reach the teacher, not a creature of nothing. "[7]

Most of what the writers have written here has been talking about walking in nature, away from humans, where the flat green spaces inspire tranquility. But what about walking in cities, walking in the capitals of the modern world, where hundreds pass each other in the streets every day? Certainly, this kind of walking will not create the state of stillness that is left by walking in the heart of nature; but this does not mean that it has no special advantages, it becomes, with it, an adventure filled with pleasure.

Adventure walking in the city

Unlike the small villages where everyone knows everyone else, we are in the city only a group of strangers who find themselves sharing the same place. Sometimes we may feel lonely, sometimes alienated, but all this does not come without feeling overwhelmed by freedom. There is a circus moment in the streets of the city where everyone is unknown and no one knows anyone. Even if you are free from the burden of your own self, you have to leave that self on the doorstep of the house before you go out and walk away from it. Just a body among the rest of the bodies.

This is what British author Virginia Woolf has felt on a night of winter in the streets of London, which she wrote in detail in her article "Street Hunt," Wolf says at the beginning of the article: "We get out of the house on a clear evening between the fourth and sixth, From our own friends, we are part of an army of unknown people walking in the streets. " Wolf then talks about the weight of that identity, which carries every purpose and every piece of furniture in the house: "We sit in our rooms, always surrounded by those things that express ourselves and impose on us the memories we carry." Outside the house, outside that very busy space and memories, we walk as light as the air, just a walking body and a visionary eye around it: "We close the door behind us and all that disappears ... The shell that hides behind our souls to make itself different from others is broken, Only a conch of things, a giant eye, remains. "

City streets offer a rich meal for that eye. There is no alley or corner of a shop, above its shelves, we find hundreds of objects. Some of us attract and contemplate them, imagining them in our possession, so that another purpose grabs our attention and sets our eyes on it. "As you pass through your eyes, everything looks as if, miraculously and miraculously, it was touched with a touch of beauty, as if the waves of trade that were carrying their loads neatly on the shores of Oxford Street had only received treasures tonight, The eye looks generously around it and beautifies everything. "

In those shops and on the sidewalks, other unknown people are taking part. There is momentum of detail, lives intersecting and breaking in seconds; sometimes we can pause to contemplate them and extend those few seconds. That's what Wolf did on her walk that night. The wife of the bookseller used in the book market, a dwarf in a shoe shop during her shoe experience, and two blind men walking with a young boy guiding them stood. Combining the details with some imagination, Wolf takes on life and dates for what people and things are hoping for, and drowns her head in a sea of ​​worlds and other lives.

"We can penetrate these other lives a bit, to go inside them far enough to make a deceptive suggestion that we are not tied to one mind, that we can even wear other bodies and minds for a few seconds, one of us can become a servant, a bar owner, And any pleasure and surprise are greater than those we feel when we leave the straight lines of our characters and move behind the steps that lead us to the lives of other human beings? "[8]

Then the time is short and the streets are empty, or we are tired of the frequent roaming, whichever is the nearest, and we find our steps back to us again for the road of the house. After all those hours we have spent lightening ourselves and carrying them, we are free to follow other steps, flooding us back to the space of the self and the house with warmth, and feel after our short journey away from what is familiar with nostalgia for the impact of our normal life; it has cleared our Sirna dust of boredom intensified by repetitive repetition, Small details come back again, we look to live, on a new morning.