Nothing gets solved at the desk that couldn't be solved on the street.

I believe this more every year and I've stopped being embarrassed about it. There's a kind of problem, the important kind, the kind with no obvious next step, that does not respond to sitting. You can sit at it for hours. You can sit at it with coffee and without, with music and in silence, with the door open and shut. It just sits back. And then you give up and go outside, and somewhere around the second corner it moves.

I used to think this was a coincidence, or a trick of relief. Now I think the walking is the thinking. The legs are doing it. The desk was the interruption.

The engine

Here is how it feels from the inside, as far as I can describe it.

The first five minutes are nothing. You're still at the desk in your head, replaying the problem, annoyed. Then the body finds its pace, the one it likes, and something shifts a gear. The problem stops being a wall in front of you and becomes something off to one side, in the corner of the eye, and you're not looking at it directly, you're looking at a dog, a doorway, a woman carrying a lamp, and the problem is just sort of walking alongside.

And then, around the third mile, if it is going to happen, it happens. Not an answer. A rearrangement. The pieces you had been staring at turn out to have a different order, and the different order has been sitting there the whole time, and the only thing that changed is that you stopped staring.

I don't know why the third mile. But it is the third mile. Ask anyone who does this.

The people who knew

The writers all knew. It's almost embarrassing how many of them said it. Nietzsche said not to trust any thought that came while sitting down, which is a strong position from a man who wrote a lot of books, but he meant it. Thoreau said his thoughts began to flow the moment his legs did, and he walked four hours a day, which explains the books and also the fact that he did not have a job. Virginia Woolf walked London to find sentences and wrote about it as a kind of haunting, going out in the evening on the excuse of buying a pencil and coming back with a whole essay. Dickens walked twenty miles at a stretch, at night, when he couldn't write.

Every one of them treated it as the actual work. Not a break from the work. The desk was where you wrote it down. The street was where it came from.

I did not believe them until I had a problem that lasted a year, and solved it on a Tuesday afternoon between a bakery and a laundromat, and had to stand there on the sidewalk saying it to myself so I wouldn't lose it before I got home.

Side by side

The other thing walking does, and I think it's the same thing, is that it lets two people talk.

There's a difference between a conversation across a table and a conversation side by side, and the difference is the eyes. Across a table you have to look at each other, or decide not to, and both of those are statements. Side by side you look ahead. The eyes are busy with the street. And with the eyes out of the way, people say things they wouldn't say to a face.

I have had the important conversations of my life, nearly all of them, walking. The one where a friend told me something he had been carrying for a decade, on a bridge. The one where I said a thing to my father that I had been not saying for longer than that, on a road by a reservoir, both of us looking at the water. The hard conversations of a relationship, the ones that decide it, had an alarming tendency to happen on a walk to get groceries, and the groceries never got got.

I think it's because walking gives you somewhere to put the silence. At a table a silence is a hole. On a street it's just a block. You can walk a whole block without saying anything and it isn't a failure, it's a block, and the next block is coming, and by then maybe you've found the words.

Hills

I live in a city of hills, which changes the practice.

Flat walking is for thinking. You can go for an hour on the flat and not notice the body at all. Hills are for the other thing, the thing where the body takes over and the thinking stops. Halfway up a real hill there is no problem anymore. There's a hill. Your legs are doing arithmetic with your lungs, and whatever you were worrying about has been set down at the bottom, and you'll pick it up again at the top, and it'll be smaller, because you've been looking at the whole bay.

I think that's the thing the phrase "walk it off" was pointing at, before it became something coaches said. You don't solve the thing by walking. You walk until the thing is the right size. And the right size is usually the size it looks from the top of a hill, which is: there, real, and small enough to carry home.

The mechanism, if you want one

Someone once explained to me, with some confidence, that walking pumps blood to the brain and that's why it works, and someone else, with equal confidence, said it was the rhythm, the legs at a steady beat entraining the mind to a slower, wider tempo. I find both of these plausible and neither of them satisfying. They explain why it helps. They don't explain why the thought arrives at the third mile between a bakery and a laundromat, fully formed, like something handed to you by a stranger.

I've decided it does not matter. The legs know. The legs have been thinking since before there were desks, since before there was anything to sit on, when the only way to work a problem was to move through the world until the world rearranged it for you. Sitting is new. Sitting is a few thousand years old. Walking is the original method, and the mind was built on top of it, and it still runs best on the platform it was built for.

So when it sits back, I get up. I go out. I take the problem for a walk, the way you take a dog, and somewhere around the second corner it stops pulling, and around the third mile it sits down and looks at me, and tells me what it wanted the whole time.