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I don’t drink alcohol, and I don’t use any drugs.
But for as long as I can remember, I’ve been prone to bad anxiety. I’ve also chosen a career that requires creative thinking. Those are two conditions that, for eons, have led lots of people to use alcohol and drugs.
So I need alternatives.
This column is about walking. How I use it in my daily life and how I use the concept in my novel.
A Web not a Filing Cabinet
When I was done with soccer—or, better said, when soccer was done with me—I took up running as my primary form of exercise. I soon realized something by accident. Because I like quiet, I’d run in out-of-the-way places, and I’d never run with headphones. As a result, my mind was free to roam. I found that after the first 10 minutes and until about minute 45, I was at my most most calm and my most creative. Not only did I get great ideas, my brain naturally ordered them in a form that could be written or spoken. Running turned my mind into my own personal proto-chatbot.
This was like a gift from heaven. I could use running to slow my racing thoughts. So it was a salve for my personal mind. But it was also like a map to my professional mind. See, my brain works differently than the brains of people I admire. It’s like they have a perfectly ordered filing cabinet between their ears. If they want to access something in there, they know exactly where it is, they get it, and they say it or write it.
But from a young age, I knew I had subpar recall. I’d read and learn all sorts of things, but I couldn’t retrieve any of it on demand. But at certain times, my mind would suddenly work in this wonderful way: An idea would emerge and that would activate a bunch of facts and figures in my head. If someone had asked me an hour earlier who Catherine the Great married, I couldn’t have answered. But once this unprovoked cascade of ideas would start, I’d think of Peter III, Potemkin, Voltaire, Crimea, the war with Turkey, the Hermitage…
I didn’t have a filing cabinet. I had a web. The ideas and facts were in there, and they were connected to one another. But I didn’t have a map of the web, and it was generally shrouded. So I couldn’t easily retrieve things from it. I needed something to turn on the web’s internal lights.
Running, and then walking, did it.
About a Month of Walks
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. There are lots of examples of scientists, writers, artists, and others who go for long walks—often with a partner—to get inspiration. But it took me a while to figure this out. Once I did, running changed. It wasn’t just something I did daily for exercise with the side benefit of creative, ordered thoughts. Eventually, when I needed to think more clearly or more creatively about something, I’d purposely go for a run. And it usually worked. I might not get the grand unified theory or even what I was hoping to get, but I’d almost always get something. I just had to point my mind in the right direction and start running.
In time I’d realize that if I ran too fast (like if I were training for a race), the ideas wouldn’t come. The increased physical exertion would sap the mental energy, I think. I also realized, thanks to aching knees and ankles, that as I got older, I couldn’t run every day or for the same distances. This is when I began nightly walks.
They range from 40 to 80 mins. Sometimes I listen to a podcast first, then just think about whatever I was listening to (thanks Russ, Jonah, John, Sara, Melvin, Marshall, Christine et al, some guys…). Sometimes I just think the entire time about whatever occurs to me. But once or twice a week, I begin the walk with a purpose—something like, “I need to write about victimless crimes tonight.” At the end of the walk, I have ideas about particular arguments I want to make, topics I need to read up on, thoughts about how paragraphs should be organized, etc.
As you probably guessed, this very column is the result of my starting a walk by saying, “I should write something about how walking has improved my non-fiction and fiction writing.”
As for non-fiction, two of my long essays in National Affairs—one applying Kuhn’s scientific-revolutions ideas to policy, the other showing the similarities between subsidiarity and Hayek’s thinking—only came together because of long walks.
As for fiction, about a year ago, I decided I needed to make a huge structural change to my novel. I had to alter a major event and change its placement in the book, which required a bunch of new ideas, 100 other micro-changes, and connective tissue to hold it all together. Once I decided I was going to take this on, I literally said to myself, “Well, figuring this out will take about a month of walks.” In fact, it took more like six weeks of walk. But it worked. And I wouldn’t have been able to make these massive improvements without those walks.
My Novel and Walking Characters
This link between physical and mental activity was so important to me that I wanted to make it a central part of my novel. But with a twist.
I wanted to use it to explore the worries and sadness that people have. That is, rather than emphasizing the benefits of walking, I wanted the reader to appreciate that characters were moving about because they were dealing with painful things. Since people seldom talk openly about their struggles, I used these walks to signal to the reader the characters’ silent suffering or rumination. There are four clear examples.
Narrator: Beginning in the novel’s second paragraph, the narrator discusses his lonely walks. As the story unfolds, the reader better understands the narrator’s personal unwinding through these walks. At the novel’s end, we understand that he’s begun healing because these strolls are finished. He says to his interlocutor, “Ever since Community Day, I’ve had no desire to go on my long, solitary evening walks. Maybe it cured all of the palliative peripatetics.”
Nelly: We meet Nelly in the first sentence. She might be the novel’s hero. But she’s wracked with guilt for her old (perceived) sins. To ease or at least distract her anguished mind, she scurries through the neighborhood every night.
The Wayfarers: During the pandemic, hundreds of the county’s isolated, scared residents create a makeshift track near a river so they can silently walk together, six feet apart.
Blowtorch Len McGregor: The novel’s most enigmatic character is a very old man who walks around the neighborhood’s perimeter each day. People think he’s patrolling or snooping. But the reader learns that he’s haunted by events in his past and the neighborhood’s downward trajectory.
In all four cases, the reader knows that a character has found peace when the seemingly aimless walking finally comes to a halt.