The Walking Cure

The first day of spring, and I have succumbed to what we medical men call a stinking cold (Coryza odorata). This is especially annoying as tomorrow I am heading for Kent – 'Kent, sir – everybody knows Kent – apples, cherries, hops and women,' as Mr Jingle sums it up – to spend a few days walking in agreeable company. A cold, stinking or not, won't stop me, and the walking will surely speed my recovery – Solvitur ambulando, as they say: a phrase on which I dilate in my forever forthcoming book (the ostensible subject of which is butterflies). Here, to give you something to read if I fall silent over the long weekend, is an exclusive, never before seen extract: 

There is a Latin saying, Solvitur ambulando (it is solved by walking), which originally had a philosophical meaning, referring to problems that can be solved by practical experience or demonstration. Diogenes the Cynic is said to have applied it literally, refuting Zeno’s paradoxes about the impossibility of motion by getting up and walking away (much as, many centuries later, Samuel Johnson addressed Bishop Berkeley’s theory of the immateriality of objects by kicking a large stone and declaring, ‘I refute it thus!’). Over time, solvitur ambulando took on a wider meaning, one more related to the beneficial effects of walking, an activity that can indeed play a useful part in solving problems, if only by stimulating thought (I’ll be returning to that theme shortly). The phrase got a new lease of life when the travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin used it in The Songlines, having picked it up from his friend and mentor Patrick Leigh Fermor. Fermor was a heroic walker (and self-mythologiser) who in his youth had travelled on foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, and Chatwin was a man who ‘passionately believed that walking constituted the sovereign remedy for every mental travail’. When he heard Fermor use the Latin phrase, it went straight into his notebook, and re-emerged in The Songlines, a book about the ‘songlines’ or ‘dreaming-paths’ of aboriginal Australians that celebrates the deeply human, richly satisfying activity of walking about.
 Butterfly watching is, in essence, a form of walking – not, like golf, ‘a good walk spoiled’, but rather a good walk greatly enhanced by the chance of seeing some very beautiful creatures. Walking brings with it all the pleasures and benefits of being in the open air and in motion – a particular form of motion, the steady, easy pace of walking. Unlike running, walking takes us slowly, at a human pace, through the landscape, with time to take in the sights and sounds and scents of nature, to enjoy them all and reap the benefits. I need hardly add that the kind of walking I am talking about here is not the Serious Activity, involving specialist kit, objectives and challenges, that drives some across the landscape, hideously dressed and with grim purpose in their eyes – no, it is more like a form of sauntering. The American sage Henry David Thoreau, in his essay/lecture on ‘Walking’, declares that ‘I have met but one or two persons in my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks – who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering…’ He goes on to give a fanciful account of the origins of the word ‘sauntering’ (‘from idle people who roved about the country in the middle ages, and asked charity under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land’), but never mind: Thoreau, one of the greatest, most observant and receptive of walkers, commends sauntering as the ideal form of walking. Watching butterflies is a kind of focused sauntering: walking with a purpose, yes, but one that is fluid and unpredictable, that might lead us anywhere or nowhere, and will abide no rigid programme. It is essentially walking for pleasure, but it brings with it tangible benefits. I have mentioned the health benefits of walking above. It is also, importantly, something that stimulates mental activity, for the rhythms of walking are the rhythms of thought. There is no better way of thinking through a problem than taking a walk. I’m sure I am not the only writer who gets most of his better ideas and composes most of his better passages when walking: I even had the idea for this book (which may or may not turn out to be one of my better ones) while walking – among butterflies, needless to say. Walking – especially walking alone – offers a kind of suspensive freedom in which the mind can operate more freely than when hemmed in by circumstance and moving to rhythms imposed by necessity. Nietzsche, who was a prodigious walker, believed that ‘All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking’, and once wrote an entire book (The Wanderer and His Shadow) from notes made while on his epic walks. Never one to understate his case, Nietzsche counselled his readers to ‘give credence to no thought that is not born in the open air and accompanied by free movement’, and even declared that sitting still was ‘the real sin against the Holy Ghost’. Kierkegaard, a philosopher of a less fire-breathing disposition than Nietzsche, wrote in a letter that ‘every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and 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, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill … Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.’ Solvitur ambulando indeed.