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How Walking Fosters Creativity: Stanford Researchers Confirm What Philosophers and Writers Have Always Known

''A certain Zen proverb goes something like this: “A five year old can understand it, but an 80 year old cannot do it.” The subject of this riddle-like saying has been described as “mindfulness”—or being absorbed in the moment, free from routine mental habits. In many Eastern meditative traditions, one can achieve such a state by walking just as well as by sitting still—and many a poet and teacher has preferred the ambulatory method.

This is equally so in the West, where we have an entire school of ancient philosophy—the “peripatetic“—that derives from Aristotle and his contemporaries’ penchant for doing their best work while in leisurely motion. Friedrich Nietzsche, an almost fanatical walker, once wrote, “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Nietzsche’s mountain walks were athletic, but walking—Frédéric Gros maintains in his A Philosophy of Walking—is not a sport; it is “the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found.”...''