Thinking on your feet
I've been thinking about walking a lot lately.
Most of my PhD was written while walking.
Edinburgh is a very walkable city, and you can get most places from where we stay in an hour or less, so we tend to walk most places - to the shops, to work, to the cinema. I would usually walk with my headphones in, listening to one of the few podcasts I'm a regular subscriber to. Perhaps I wanted to use walking as a break from consuming media, or perhaps I left my headhpones at home (more likely), but at some point I stopped listening to things as I went. I found that I was trying to problem solve my PhD over the noise of bad film reviews, which meant I wasn't thinking, and I wasn't listening either. So I stopped taking my headphones with me, and just started walking.
I started walking early in the morning in the hope that it might kickstart my brain. I also started going on longer walks carrying weights as an alternative to my generally preferred form of cardio, cycling. Walking gave me a self-imposed opportunity to step away from my desk, to stop trying to problem solve the PhD by just staring at it or moving commas around, and to work through some of the arguments and decisions I was making. Walking became part of my methodology - walking sessions were writing sessions.
Of course, they weren't LITERALLY writing sessions - I didn't rig myself up with a laptop and go wandering about the streets of Edinburgh like an academic Ariathome (if you don't know Ari but like music, go check out his videos). Ideas didn't come to me fully formed. But as I was walking, I would try and focus on a particular problem I was having, and as thoughts sprung up I would stop, take a few Apple Notes, then keep going. I can still remember very specifically where I was walking when I first considered what would become an illustrative model for the practice of plork.
"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
That walking is creatively productive isn't a groundbreaking discovery. There is a long history of authors who walked. Merlin Cleverley argues, in The Art of Wandering, that walking and writing are, in effect, one activity; Nietzsche thought it was integral to generating ideas. But the power and usefulness of walking specifically as part of the practice of writing wasn't something I had consciously experienced before.
I say consciously, because inevitably I have experienced this before. These ideas are the heart of embodied learning—a pedagogical and philosophical approach that understands knowledge as something made through doing, feeling, moving. Educational theorists like Shaun Gallagher (2005) and Lakoff & Johnson (1999) have written at length about the ways cognition emerges from sensorimotor experience. This makes walking not a distraction from intellectual work, but a form of it.
Instead of feeling like walking was a break from the writing, walking became a specific part of the writing process. I wasn't wasting time going for a walk - I was, if anything, more productive than when I was sitting at my laptop trying to make each individual sentence work.
And the more I thought about it, the more this made sense. Walking can be a form of play, and I approached it playfully. Playfulness, as scholars like Sicart (2014) have pointed out, isn’t about the activity itself—it’s a mindset, a way of engaging with the world that’s curious, responsive, flexible. Walking can hold and encourage that mindset. In doing so, walking can be a generative space in its own right. So, walking isn't just play - walking, is plorking.
Walking was so productive for me that I now try to make it a daily thing - even if it's just for 15 minutes or so. At the Playful Learning Conference recently, I was up before breakfast walking on the South Downs way, burning some calories but more importantly processing my thoughts during the conference. And sure, when I want to switch off, I put some headphones in. But when I need to figure something out, I lead with my feet.
So next time you're writing, or making, include walking as a conscious part of your process or routine. Not just when you can't think of an idea, or need a break, or feel overloaded - specifically schedule in time to walk as part of your creative process.
Let your body do the thinking for a bit.
References
COVERLEY, M. 2012. *The Art of Wandering, *Herts, Oldcastle Books.
GALLAGHER, S. 2005. *How the Body Shapes the Mind, *Oxford, Oxford University Press.
LAKOFF, G. & JOHNSON, M. 1999. *Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought, *New York, Basic Books.
MARSHALL, L. 2022. Get Morning Light, Sleep Better at Night. *WebMD *[Online]. Available from: https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/morning-light-better-sleep 2025].
MILLS, B. 2012. Path to enlightenment: how walking inspires writers. The Guardian Online.
SICART, M. 2014. *Play matters, *Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.