How Walking Became Pedestrian

Glorified for its creative benefits, the pastime has become yet another goal-driven pursuit.

- Michael Lapointe

Life Span, a maker of fitness equipment, claims that a treadmill desk will boost my creativity. The company’s website, where I can purchase its basic model for $1,099, features an inspirational quote from Nietzsche: “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” Researchers agree on the connection between an acute mind and legs in motion. Studies have shown that we do better on tests of memory and attention during or after exercise. Studies have also shown that a walker’s mental meandering is unusually conducive to innovation. “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk,” Søren Kierkegaard advised, and I’m hardly the only writer who has heeded the call, putting one foot before the other in search of fresh insights and breakthroughs in knotty arguments.

Before the advent of scientific evidence and philosophical guidance on the subject, literary odes to the creative and health benefits of walking flourished. No one has been more tireless in reviving the history of exhortations to join the “Order of Walkers” than the British editor and BBC producer Duncan Minshull. Back in 2000, he co-edited The Vintage Book of Walking: A Glorious, Funny and Indispensable Collection, which could also boast of being the most comprehensive anthology of such proselytizing, spanning fiction and nonfiction. It was reissued in 2014 as While Wandering: A Walking Companion.