Rebecca solnit a history of walking5/26/2023 ![]() And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete-for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations. Black butterflies fluttered around me, tossed along by wind and wings, and they called up another era of my past. I wasn't sure whether I was too soon or too late for the purple lupine that can be so spectacular in these headlands, but milkmaids were growing on the shady side of the road on the way to the trail, and they recalled the hillsides of my childhood that first bloomed every year with an extravagance of these white flowers. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. ![]() ![]() ![]() Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. ![]()
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