Years ago, a hazy blue memory now, in the gleeful, wee early days of her life, I introduced my newborn to walking about. Bundled against the slight late-winter sun, we slipped out. We did not venture far.

“If the day is fine, any walk will do,” wrote Annie Dillard in her pilgrimage into nature.

I’ll never forget baring a warm chest for impromptu nursing at the swan pond in Kensington Gardens—Arctic wind notwithstanding—anything to soothe her crying. People pitied my new motherhood. She was satiated. I was wobbly but proud.

Our first walk was imperfect but vanquished. I felt a wholeness with her and with my new-mother self. I love these words from Thoreau’s beautiful essay on walking as freedom: 

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for, I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day.

Walking connects mind and body and fills both to the brim with feelings of unity and hope.

Franz Kafka endured a traumatic period of deep restlessness when a failed marriage proposal escalated to a humiliating public trial (and inspired his own The Trial). Kafka’s biographer, Elias Canetti, describes how a relentless quest for sleep led Kafka into manic bouts of walking:

He plunges with a sort of elevation into every activity that demands and restores the unity of the body [… long walks in the country which enabled him to breathe freely—all these enliven him and give him hope that for once, for even a longer time, he might be able to escape from the disintegration of the wakeful night.
From Elias Canetti’s Kafka’s Other Trial

When my husband asked why I bothered to walk my daughter into the cold, I served him a line from Emerson’s early essay on our intuitive connection to nature: “The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon!”

I verge on horizons, especially at the dawn of new time, like the change of a season or temper. Like many I have invited to The Examined Life community, I seek a good hill - the huffing and puffing kind. Like Kafka, walking restores my unity invites harmony and addresses unwanted wakefulness.

British author Robert Macfarlane investigates a need for walking in his superb book The Old Ways. Macfarlane collects and showcases a blend of walkers, path-forgers, and followers who have roamed the British Isles for centuries. He finds our creation of paths emanates from a human need to move:

As I walk paths, I often wonder about their origins, the impulses that have led to their creation, the records they yield of customary journeys, and the secrets they keep of adventures, meetings, and departures. I would guess I have walked perhaps 7,000 or 8,000 miles on footpaths so far in my life: more than most, perhaps, but not nearly so many as others. […] I’ve covered thousands of foot-miles in my memory, because when—as most nights—I find myself insomniac, I send my mind out to re-walk paths I’ve followed, and in this way can sometimes pace myself into sleep.
From Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways

Just as walking can be soporific, it is equally energizing. As we engage our gait, so spring our thoughts, vital unconscious, and creativity.

Creative talents such as Gustav Mahler, Charles Dickens, Rousseau, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mary Oliver, mathematician Henri Poincare, Gertrude Stein, and poets A. E. Housman and Wallace Stevens benefited from improved footfall. Some sought natural environs, some the city – the common element was movement and thought.

I write while walking. Although I type indoors, my sentences self-compose while I am walking. Amid play, my mind works still. I repeat thoughts until I can retype them verbatim. (It’s not coincidental that I fit into a profession that allows - nay demands - daily walking.)

Vincent van Gogh, a “formidable walker,” unveiled an artist’s eye for fields, suns, and trees, “I walked across a large grassy field there surrounded by trees and houses, with the spire rising high above them.” His most coalesced and inspired thoughts often unfolded after long walks. He was gathering these single points of creative beginning into his work.

It’s not just what we think while walking. It’s what we forge by walking.

Macfarlane reminds us that these paths are the memories of people, the remnants of society, individuals, and even ourselves. We leave tracks, evidence of our existence. The ground bears witness (and easily carries it, unlike humans).

We easily forget that we are track-makers because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete—and these substances are not easily impressed. […] It’s true that once you begin to notice them, you see that the landscape is still webbed with paths and footways […].
From Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways

It's not just that we warm the brain or demonstrate existence; there is something else that hooks our unconscious and draws us out step by step.

In her lovely, creatively unbounded book of musings and illustrations, The Principles of Uncertainty, artist Maira Kalman longs for a lengthy walk—“My dream is to walk around the world. A smallish backpack, all essentials neatly in place.”—but settles for a few steps in others’ shoes.

Kalman undergoes that critical suspension of self—the true root of empathy—to see others. Walking as they walk, stepping as they step. Occasionally communicating, but mostly watching. It is a profoundly perceptive collection of images, often people’s backs. “Everyone is going forward, and everyone is behind everyone,” Kalman writes.

"Walk, walk, walk" by Maira Kalman in Principles of Uncertainty.

Walking is a way of seeing.

Charles Dickens knew this; he paced London (I imagine him restless restless restless), twelve or fourteen miles a night in relentless pursuit of personality and characters. People and neighborhoods among which he had once lived but from which his success had removed him. Like Kalman, Dickens saw people and then wrote them.

Contemporary Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark agreed, writing in his short but elegant prose/poem In Praise of Walking:

Daily walking, in all weathers in every season, becomes a sort of ground or continuum upon which the least emphatic occurrences are registered clearly.
To be completely lost is a good thing on a walk.

The most distant places seem accessible once one is on the road.
Convictions, directions, and opinions, are of less importance than sensible shoes.
When I spend a day talking I feel exhausted, when I spend it walking I am pleasantly tired. 

When walking, we register fully in our minds the details we perceive with our senses.

Indeed, walking is about witnessing because it is about connecting—to people, ourselves, our minds, or simply our world. We connect to others as we shuffle forward toward that heaven-verging horizon.

As you idle by or swiftly saunter, take with you a few companions: J. Drew Langham's poetic guide to holding nature in the palm of your heart, Grace Paley's close observations of a beloved city, Keats's most perfect "Ode to Autumn," written while walking around trails in Winchester, trails that still bear his name, and Jan Enkelmann's eerily spectacular photography of a city denuded of walkers.