On the Importance of Walking

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk." -Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard once observed that going for daily walks was vital for his mental health. As he put it, “Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being”, adding that it was during these solitary walks that he always came up with his “best thoughts.”

In his words:

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”

Kierkegaard was not the only philosopher to value the health-benefits of a daily walk. Nietzsche once joked that one should never trust a thought that came whilst sitting down. He called this “thinking with your butt” (or, as he put it in German, Sitzfleisch, meaning, the “sitting flesh”.)¹

The “wanderer” became a recurring motive in romantic art and painting of the 19th century. One of the most famous examples can be seen in Caspar David Friedrich’s “the wanderer” (1818). We see a young man standing upon a rock formation, looking down into a sea of fog. It’s a romantic metaphor for enlightenment and discovery. As Schopenhauer put it, the romantic thinker “builds his nest on some lofty solitude.”

And yet walking can be beneficial to us without having to go very far at all. Sometimes all it takes is a quick stroll around the neighborhood. It’s not about chasing, but about noticing. Walking encourages us to pay attention to the little things, escape the negative cycles of doom-scrolling, and bring us small moments of grace and joy. As Simone Weil put it, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” A walk is a little gift you give to yourself.

In the 19th century the figure of the flâneur, or "leisurely wanderer," became a popular theme for urban dwellers. Anyone could be a flâneur. All you had to do was go outside, without any real purpose, and just walk around the urban landscape. It was a philosophy of walking that emphasized the importance of purposeless walking. Today, that seems more important than ever. It’s a welcome reminder that you can go outside without having to spend money. Instead, you can simply let yourself be surprised by your surroundings and in so doing invite the unexpected into your life.

As the Italian author Federico Castigliano put it, “The destiny of every walking man is to immerse himself in the panorama surrounding him, to the point of becoming one with it and, ultimately, to vanish"

Which is to say, walking is also a way of disappearing. Surrounded by strangers, you can be anonymous and drift, like a ghost haunting your own life. In this process of detachment, the walker paradoxically feels more alive and present, whilst also disappearing for a moment completely. You don’t have to be available for anyone, you can simply be. There’s something very freeing about going for a walk, and flowing though space on your own terms. As Walter Benjamin characterized it, “the crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons the flâneur as phantasmagoria -now a landscape, now a room.”

It’s an interesting paradox. We go for walks to be more present, but also -in a sense- to take a break from our own lives. And in this curious interplay between absence and presence, we somehow feel more alive. Or, in the words of Balzac,

“To saunter is to live.”

Hopefully this post will encourage you to go for a short walk today. In fact, that’s exactly what I’m going to do right now. I’ll see you out there.

Julian

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1. It should perhaps also be noted that Nietzsche suffered from Syphilis. As he began to deteriorate, he would sometimes enter into a crazed state, walking for hours in the mountains and even stripping off his clothes. Not exactly a “pleasant walk”…