How Walking Daily Can Completely Change Your Life
Walking is the ultimate medicine to spark creative ideas, free the spirit and quiet a troubled soul.
Nietzsche walked alone for hours every day and made this a centerpiece of his philosophy. The relationship between the mind in motion and the mystery of presence was a condition of his work.
‘It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.’ — Nietzsche.
Many of the world’s most prolific writers and philosophers advocated taking long walks. Rousseau and Nietzsche walked to ignite creativity. Rimbaud walked in a fury, Nerval to cure melancholy. Kant walked through his town daily to escape the “compulsion of thought.”
A return to our senses.
Walking helps us to ‘unhook’ awareness from our chattering minds, expand our sense of interconnectedness and return to our senses.
As we put one foot in front of the other, we are nurtured as we walk the path to happiness and healing.
Walking is a path to understanding how enmeshed we are in the web of life on this planet leading to a sense of grounded belonging. There are moments of vibration between our bodies and the landscape we are in. We each occupy a node within the web.
The earth resonates, we resonate, and her tone heals us. We breathe with her.
With each step, the body learns to perceive. When we attune to the song of the earth, when cosmic rhythms resonate within us, shaping who we are and who we are becoming, we are human again. We begin to fully experience the synchronous presence of consciousness in each moment, with each step.
The earth is crying out to all of us to pay attention.
When we are walking, we tune into the sounds coming to our attention from the earth and the landscape. Our hearts and minds become realigned.
We are stillness in motion.
I used to believe I walked upon the earth.
I came to believe I live within the earth.
We are never separate from creation.
We are all spirit energy.
Joined to everything that is everywhere.
Switch off your phone.
Take out your earbuds.
Put one foot in front of the other.
Come, walk with me.
A sense of place and belonging
I have walked the beach paths and mountain trails in the Minho region of northern Portugal for more than ten years. It feels like I am part of the land itself. This place is my soul land. I am deeply rooted in its wild heaven.
Without this place. I don’t think I’d know who I was and am.
‘Oh woman
Remember who you are
Woman
You are the whole earth.’
I have walked every day since I arrived.
I slowly began to spend more and more time outside. Little solitary walks grew into long hikes. As I walked, I focused on the wisdom of the senses. Weaving myself back into the fabric of the earth.
This place. This landscape. Rugged mountains and vast ocean.
Something about the beach, the ocean, the flow of the waves and the tides, the lighthouse, this coastline calls me.
It pulls on my heart and draws me in.
I walk the coast, and the wind blows angry stories from my mind. I leave my screens behind. The compulsion to communicate with words falls away with each stride. The sharp edges of my mechanical existence soften into the depths of the ocean, the expanse of the sky.
In the early morning, I like to hike in the mountains.
In the thick of the hills, the density of the forest muffles the soundscape.
No earbuds required. They will only cocoon me within my own private world of nonsense.
Instead, I listen to the forest. I hear what I need to hear.
Thin tree trunks, thick saplings, and elders surround me.
Keep walking, striding, moving….
…away from the screens and constant barrage of technological noise.
The forest begins to breathe.
My body remembers itself back into the life of the earth, this land.
Full-bodied alertness, alive in a living field of intelligence. I am immersed in the resonance of the landscape. Magnificent, stately pine trees. I can almost hear them breathe and whisper as they look down on teeny tiny me scurrying past.
An elaborate spider web, covered in morning dew, guards the path.
Carefully crafted on the limbs of an old oak tree. A small brown spider dangles from a single strand.
A tiny line of black ants, two of them bumping into each other, my footsteps have disorientated them. They quickly rejoin the line.
I continue along the path, no idea where it’s taking me. I trust it completely.
All thoughts have dissolved into the breathing body of mountains and trees.
There IS a vast abundance of life on this beautiful earth. Going about its business independent of us. And yet, here I feel like I’m inside it. Alive in its folds.
The bulk of the forest shifts around me, and I feel my own smallness amongst the trees.
And I sense my own autonomy within the world. I’m embedded, rooted within this landscape — but I am not bound or imprisoned.
Just like the clouds in the ocean blue sky. Breath-like beings that drift and float by. They are the landscape, but they are free to do their thing.
This is the error of our human belief. That we live ON the earth. And are separate from it.
When in fact, we dwell IN the earth. And we are part of it.
Like the clouds that embrace the air, accompanying the earth as she turns.
Breathing with the earth, breathing with each of us, drifting through the same air.
We circulate earth’s energy between us and nourish ourselves on her magic.
We ARE immersed in the depths of this beautiful, breathing planet.
As I keep walking, the drift of my thoughts is shaped and carried by the alterations of the landscape.
Thinking with my senses, very few thoughts are embodied in words. Momentary insights, ideas, and creative impulses blooming up from my belly.
Walking breaks the spell of hardened words.
Power-driven thinking loosens with each stride.
The petals of my brain slowly open to meet the warmth of the morning sun’s rays.
There are brief moments where there is no separation between me and the landscape. A new sense of wakefulness tingles along the surface of my skin — mental clarity, a sense of peace, and embodied freedom in a much larger space.
A creative idea slips into my awareness, compelling my attention momentarily. I wish I had my notebook. Nietzsche always walked with a notebook.
This is where stories are nurtured within me.
And it is where among the pine trees, granite and sea. I am at one with creation.
I listen. I trust.
I am the hare, the boar, and the snake. I am pine, oak, and birch.
I am the rich brown of the earth — the deep blue of the ocean.
Rooted in the land. A part of it.
Home.
What happens when we don’t get out in nature?
We seal ourselves off into numbing solitude. Cut off and insulated from nature’s nourishment.
We slip blissfully into the machine. Offering ourselves up to any technology, post, or video that promises to fix our humdrum existence.
We close ourselves off from any uncertainty.
Google it.
We take our primary truths from it and hold the earth at a distance.
Screened off.
Forced to view the natural world like spectators. Coolly observing it as if it’s part of the technological show. The spontaneous life of our senses…
… stuffed.
Only when we move our bodies and get outside, unplugged, can we acclimate to the wonder that enfolds us.
Listen closely.
We are embedded in the tangible textures, the cacophony of sounds, shapes, and tones of the earth.
We are neither pure spirit or pure mind. Something other than the cognitive functioning of the human mind is at play.
We are sensitive, sentient bodies with our own unique tone. We are sensed, seen, heard, and touched by the beings around us.
Listen to the wind.
It speaks with a thousand green tongues as it rushes through trees, across oceans, highways, buildings, and into the folds of the earth.
Sometimes when I can’t hear the earth, I walk barefoot.
Actually, I walk barefoot a lot.
Someone once said
‘Put some shoes on, girl; we’re not in Africa’
I smiled.
Because I love to feel the earth beneath my feet.
Soil pressed up against my skin. Sand massages and wakes up my soles. Sharp dry grass pricks my toes.
My feet are like ears.
Listening downward.
The more we spend our days staring at screens, the harder it gets to connect with this field.
We may venture outside our office or away from our screens occasionally. But because some of us have been plugged into the machine for so long, we gaze at the landscape like detached spectators.
Synapsed to the digital screen. A digitized mind neglects the stones, the trees, and the grasses. Forgets its dependence on a world it did not create. Human senses lose their ability to attune to the earth tones and the mystery that flows beneath our beliefs.
The earth is no longer a limitless field of aliveness we are situated in. But as something we look at briefly from the outside.
Like a disembodied mind.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
You were born to walk.
Dedicate time every day to go outside and walk. Listen, feel and sense the world.
Once your body gets going, it will want more.
Wrap your arms around a centuries-old tree.
Walk barefoot on the grass.
Notice the sustaining resonance between your heartbeat and the trees.
Notice the pulse rising from the earth up in the soles of your feet.
Whether in the heart of the city or the thick of the wild, your soul will stir and come awake whenever you find yourself moving, breathing through your landscape.
In conclusion
Start today.
Get up, get out and walk.
Walk boldly.
Reclaim your human.
We are all living beings, and every flower pushing through the concrete is your way home.
