Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Walking and Writing)

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow, as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper. A thousand rills which have their rise in the sources of thought burst forth and fertilize my brain. You need to increase the draft below, as the owners of meadow on Concord river say of the Billerica Dam. Only when we are in action is the circulation perfect. The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical, wooden, dull to read.”— American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), journal entry, August 19, 1851, “Thoreau’s Journal (Part IV),” in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1905

Quote of the Day (Francis Sanzaro, on the Benefits of Walking)

“Study after study after study has proved what we feel, intuitively, in our gut: Walking is good for us. Beneficial for our joints and muscles; astute at relieving tension, reducing anxiety and depression; a boon to creativity, likely; slows the aging process, maybe; excellent at prying our screens from our face, definitely.”— Climber, athlete, and author Francis Sanzaro, “The Transcendent Power of Walking,” The New York Times, Sept. 18, 2022

Yes, walking can even feel good on a cold winter day, as seen here in this picture I took from nearly a decade ago in Saddle River County Park in Ridgewood, NJ.

Quote of the Day (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on Walking)

“I can only meditate when I am walking, when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”—French political philosopher and memoirist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), The Confessions (1782)

Quote of the Day (Shane O’Mara, on Writing and ‘A Walking Brain’)

“Before you start a creatively demanding piece of work, prime yourself by writing down a few questions about what you need to do. Then head off for a 20-minute stroll and bring a voice recorder or a notebook. You’re likely to find that you generate more ideas than you would have while sitting at your desk. A walking brain is a more active brain, and more activity in the brain can bring colliding ideas and associations at the edge of consciousness to mind—resulting in the ‘a-ha’ moment of insight.”— Shane O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research, Trinity College, Dublin, In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration (2020)

Quote of the Day (Vivian Gornick, on the Healing Power of a Walk Through the City)

“As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human—the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques—was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under.”—American critic, journalist, essayist, and memoirist Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (2015)

This week seven years ago, I took the picture accompanying this post while walking through the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn—a section of the New York borough filled with tree-lined streets and brownstones. At least for me, it held some of the restorative powers that Ms. Gornick praises.

Tweet of the Day (Alyssa Limperis, on a Night Made for Walking)

“ ‘Gorgeous night for a walk’—me moving from couch to chair.” —@alyssalimp, a.k.a. actress-comedian Alyssa Limperis, tweet of Sept. 28, 2020

That amount of activity is especially appropriate for heat waves, such as the ones we’ve been having so far this summer.

Quote of the Day (Edward Hoagland, on City Walking)

“[I]f you ask people who have some choice in the matter why they live in a particular neighborhood, one answer they will give is that they ‘like to walk.’ Walking is a universal form of exercise, not age—oriented or bound to any national heritage, and costs and implies nothing except maybe a tolerant heart. Like other sports, it calls for a good eye as well as cheerful legs—those chunky gluteus muscles that are the butt of mankind’s oldest jokes—because the rhythm of walking is in the sights and one’s response as much as simply in how one steps.” —American essayist-novelist Edward Hoagland, "City Walking," New York Times Book Review, June 1, 1975, collected in Heart's Desire: The Best of Edward Hoagland: Essays from Twenty Years (1988)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Walking and the ‘Need to Be’)

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”—French novelist, playwright, essayist, and Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), Notebooks 1951-1959 (1962)

Photo of the Day: Early Spring Break, Overpeck County Park, Leonia, NJ

The way we’ve been getting rain in the Northeast the last week or so, I’d be surprised if my state, New Jersey, gets a drought warning this summer. (The downpour last Friday, for instance, was particularly terrible—and wouldn’t you know it, that’s when, on my way home from work, I had to get out of my bus when it broke down on the New Jersey Turnpike!)

That might account for why so many people were out in force this past Sunday at Overpeck County Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County. I snapped this picture in mid-afternoon, when the stir-crazy crowd was still dying to feel the sunshine on their faces while they still could.

Photo of the Day: Drizzle on National Mall, Washington, DC

If this photo feels dreary and miserable, it might be because I felt that way that November day nearly a year and a half ago. I had underestimated the distance on foot between major landmarks in Washington, DC. When I took this photo of the National Mall, then, late in the afternoon, while standing at the door of the National Gallery of Art, my feet felt sore, my clothes were damp, and I felt frustrated that I wouldn’t have anywhere near the time I wanted to explore this museum that day.

In other words, the weather reflected my mood.

Quote of the Day (Ferris Jabr, on Walking and Writing)

“Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts.” —Ferris Jabr, “Why Walking Helps Us Think,” The New Yorker, Sept. 3, 2014