“In the mornings he would walk…. At the start of a walk, alone or moving, the sun at his back or cold rain down his collar, he was more himself than under any other circumstance, until he had walked so far he was not himself, not a self, but joined to the world.”
“Outside lies magic.”
”Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”
“I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.“
Wanderlust: Rebecca Solnit on How Walking Vitalizes the Meanderings of the Mind
“Nature’s particular gift to the walker… is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive.”
“When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?
Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure — as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest.
All good things are wild and free.”
The Spirit of Sauntering: Thoreau on the Art of Walking and the Perils of a Sedentary Lifestyle
“Without walking and the contemplation of nature which is connected with it, without this equally delicious and admonishing search, I deem myself lost, and I am lost.”
Robert Walser, the Art of Walking, and Our Daily Dance of Posturing and Sincerity
“Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement. I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness.”
eselsohr 