Walking with Plato

by Gary Hayden

  Out in the countryside, you’re part of something bigger, more important, and longer lasting than yourself. So that you get dwarfed by it all. But in a good way.

  The British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch expressed it far better than I ever could in her beautiful book The Sovereignty of Good:

  I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then I suddenly observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.

  Perhaps all of this explains why so many troubled and depressive thinkers have been avid walkers.

  Take the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, for example, a man so messed up and brooding and despondent that I consider myself positively cheerful by comparison.

  By the age of twenty-one, he had lost his mother and five of his six siblings. He had a religiously melancholic father who viewed these deaths as God’s punishment for the sins of his youth. He suffered physical problems, including a curved spine and – quite possibly – sexual impotence.

  As a young man, he broke off his engagement to a young woman whom he adored, on the grounds that he could never offer her anything like a normal marriage, and then spent the rest of his life mourning for her loss.

  As a child he was ridiculed and bullied by his schoolmates, and as an adult he was ridiculed in the Danish press. To cap all of this, he suffered – perhaps unsurprisingly – from severe and chronic anxiety.

  He wrote in his journal: ‘The whole of existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation. . . . Great is my distress, unlimited.’

  At another time he wrote:

  I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away – yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit ––––––––––– and wanted to shoot myself.

  This is hard-core depression. Yet even a man afflicted with this level of despair was able to draw comfort and consolation from the simple act of walking.

  In 1847, in a letter to his niece Henrietta, he wrote:

  Above all, do not lose your desire to walk; every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

  Or, for another example, take the eighteenth-century Genevan philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  In his old age, at the close of a brilliant, but also a turbulent and unhappy life, he took to walking alone in the countryside around Paris.

  A sufferer from poor mental health, Rousseau considered himself to have been the victim of jealousy and persecution throughout his life, and had determined to end his days in withdrawal from the society that he felt had so cruelly mistreated him.

  In his final work, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, which was unfinished at his death, he describes his walks and the ‘flights of thought’ that accompanied them. It is a beautiful and lyrical book: sometimes intensely sad and sometimes wonderfully uplifting; sometimes sharply insightful and sometimes narcissistic and paranoid. To me, it paints a picture of a troubled and suspicious man, who, in his solitary walks, finds a measure of tranquillity and contentment that he could find nowhere else.

  He writes: ‘These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day during which I am fully myself and for myself, without diversion, without obstacle, and during which I can truly claim to be what nature willed.’

  At first glance, neither of these unhappy men seems like a poster boy for the therapeutic power of walking. But my point isn’t that countryside walks are a panacea for all forms of depression. It is that depressed people often find it helpful to take country walks.

  Mildly depressed people, such as my thirty-year-old self, find that walking helps to put their troubles into perspective and to improve their mood; and more severely depressed people, such as Kierkegaard and Rousseau, find that walking helps to make their lives bearable.

  Scientific evidence bears this out. Numerous studies have shown a positive link between walking and mental health.

  For example, a study reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that walking thirty minutes a day boosted the moods of depressed patients faster than antidepressants. Another study undertaken at California State University, Long Beach, found that the more people walked each day, the more energetic they felt and the better their mood. And a study undertaken by researchers at the University of Stirling revealed that walking had ‘a large effect on depression’.

  I was fortunate, then, not to be walking for just thirty minutes a day, but to be walking for seven or eight hours a day. And not only that, but also to be walking through some of the wildest, most wide-open, and most inspiring places in Britain.

  Small wonder, then, that I was beginning to feel healthier, happier, and more energized than I had felt in a long time.

  We stayed for two nights at a busy campsite just outside Inverarnan. It had plenty of facilities, including a sheltered campers’ kitchen. But it also had an unloved and uncared-for air about it.

  On our second night, as we tried to coax a little heat from a clapped-out electric ring on the clapped-out hob in the kitchen, we fell into conversation with a group of French boys, in their late teens, who were also trying to coax a little heat from a clapped-out ring on the same hob.

  They were pleasant boys, who seemed – much to my surprise – to take a genuine interest in the doings of a couple of middle-aged fellow hikers. When they learned that we were walking not just the West Highland Way but the entire length of Britain, they were astonished. One of them nodded approvingly, and then uttered a single word: ‘Respect.’

  I felt strangely moved.

  From Inverarnan, the next stage of our journey took us seventeen miles to the rural community of Rowardennan, much of it along the eastern shore of Loch Lomond.

  This has the reputation of being the toughest section of the West Highland Way because the loch-side path, such as it is, constantly rises and falls and requires you to scramble over boulders and pick your way across tree roots.

  We had been dreading lugging our backpacks along such difficult terrain, and had anticipated a long, hard day. But, as it turned out, we managed the seventeen miles, and the ups and downs, and the boulders and tree roots quite easily. We had become much leaner, fitter, and tougher than when we started.

  Loch Lomond is the largest lake in Great Britain by surface area, and second only to Loch Ness by volume. It is studded with over thirty islands of varying shapes and sizes, and set amidst magnificent mountains, including the magnificent Ben Lomond, which lies close to its eastern shore. Consequently, it is considered one of Scotland’s finest natural wonders.

  Oddly enough, I have only the haziest memories of all of this. What I recall mostly from that day is the wonderful, fully alive, fully engaged feeling I had when scrambling along the loch side, the glorious experience of being totally absorbed in the moment.

  Most of the things we do in life, we do for the sake of something else. We work to earn money; we exercise to get fit; we study to pass exams; we watch TV to relax; we engage in spiritual exercises to improve ourselves; and so on.

  But life’s most sublime moments often occur when we engage in activities entirely for their own sake, without any ulterior motives.

  When I was a child, I attended a primary school that had a large oak tree in the middle of its playing field. I recall standing alone, beneath that tree, one crisp autumn afternoon when the leaves were falling slowly but steadily from its branches.

  I soon became engrossed in the task of trying to catch those leaves as they fell.

  I would look up in
to the canopy of the tree and wait for a green-brown leaf to come spiralling down. Then I would dodge and dance around, arms outstretched, and try to grab it before it reached the ground.

  It was a surprisingly difficult and tremendously absorbing activity. I soon lost all track of time, and lost consciousness of everything except those falling leaves and my desire to catch them. It was an experience of utter mindfulness, in which I achieved a state of near bliss.

  I look back on it now as one of my life’s most magical experiences. Even today, I sometimes find myself looking wistfully into the canopies of autumn trees.

  As I scrambled along the eastern shore of Loch Lomond, moving swiftly over boulders and tree roots, with my heart and lungs working hard, and with my limbs, senses, and mind all working together perfectly, I experienced something of the same exultation: a primitive joy in being alive and healthy, and fully and actively engaged with the natural world.

  By four o’clock – much earlier than expected – we had reached our destination, The Shepherd’s House B&B, which is situated in a quiet location at the edge of the Rowardennan Forest, on the east shore of Loch Lomond.

  We spent the night in a self-contained bedroom-cum-sitting-room-cum-bathroom-on-wheels, modelled on the huts that shepherds once inhabited during lambing season.

  Unlike the shepherd’s huts of yore, this one was a luxurious and well-appointed affair – though too small to swing a kitten in.

  In the morning, breakfast was delivered in a pretty wicker basket, replete with hot and cold eatables and drinkables.

  I have a photo of Wendy, perched on the edge of the bed, surveying that hamper and its contents with a look of unalloyed joy. But I don’t need the photo to remind me. Her smile is etched into my memory.

  There’s a quote that is often attributed to the French author and philosopher Albert Camus that goes like this:

  When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.

  I have my doubts that it was Camus who said it. But, Camus or not, it captures something important and true. The unclouded smile, the ‘glow of happiness’, on Wendy’s face as she surveyed that basket gave me a glorious yet terrifying glimpse of the capacity for happiness within her.

  Gensei was right: ‘With the happiness held in one inch-square heart you can fill the whole space between heaven and earth.’

  The following day’s walk took us just eleven miles from Rowardennan to Drymen (pronounced Drimmen), a village lying a couple of miles east of the southern end of Loch Lomond.

  The trail ran first between the loch on our right and the Rowardennan Forest on our left. Then it climbed up and over the sharp little summit of Conic Hill, with splendid views of the loch and its islands. Finally, it meandered through the thick and gloomy Garadhban (pronounced Garavan) Forest.

  This was another great day for reflection.

  In the shepherd’s hut, the previous evening, I had been reading Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace, and I was struck by a passage in which one of the book’s central characters, Pierre – at this time a prisoner of the retreating French army – is on a forced march of many days’ duration across Russia.

  At one point, he struggles through heavy rain up a muddy, slippery road. All around him are the carcasses of men and horses in varying stages of decay. He is weak and sick and half-starved and footsore.

  As he walks, he counts off his steps on his fingers and mentally addresses the rain: ‘Now then, now then, go on! Pelt harder!’

  Here, Tolstoy writes: ‘It seemed to him that he was thinking of nothing, but far down and deep within him his soul was occupied with something important and comforting.’

  Tolstoy doesn’t tell us precisely what this ‘something’ was, merely that it was ‘a most subtle spiritual deduction’ from a conversation he’d had the day before with his peasant friend and fellow prisoner Karataev. But, whatever it was, it was important and it was comforting.

  This passage really struck a chord with me. I felt that I understood precisely what Tolstoy meant.

  There’s a mode of thinking you get into when you walk long distances that is very deep but largely unconscious. Your mind takes whatever it is that you’re currently preoccupied with, or anxious about, or desirous of, or frightened of, and slowly works away at it.

  These are things that your conscious mind struggles to deal with because they’re too stressful, too abstract, too tied up with your ego, too spiritual, too shameful, too frightening, or too complex. But your unconscious mind works away at them calmly, quietly, and unseen.

  Suddenly, you have a burst of inspiration or a flash of insight that feels as though it’s come from nowhere. But it hasn’t. It’s come from deep within you.

  As I walked over the hills, across the moors, and through the forests towards Drymen, musing upon the link between walking and inspiration, it occurred to me that some of the people whom I most admire made walking an integral part of their routine.

  Charles Dickens was addicted to walking. Often, when working intensely on a project, he would cover fifteen or twenty miles in a single night ‘through the black streets of London’.

  These brisk, nocturnal walks seemed to act as a physical release for the mental strain and psychological stress of writing. ‘If I could not walk far and fast,’ he said, ‘I think I should just explode and perish.’

  But additionally, and just as importantly, walking unleashed his creativity.

  He would often plot his novels on the move. A Christmas Carol, for example, was brought to birth during a series of nocturnal ramblings in the winter of 1843. He told a friend that he had ‘composed it in his head, laughing and weeping and weeping again’, as he walked.

  Bertrand Russell also incorporated daily walks into his creative routine. Only after spending an hour or two outdoors, pacing around and organizing his thoughts, would he sit down at his desk to write. Then the words flowed quickly and easily from his pen.

  Or, to press the point home with just one more example, consider the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

  Nietzsche suffered bouts of depression throughout his life, which became more prolonged and intense as he grew older, and eventually gave way to madness. (At the time, his mental illness was diagnosed as tertiary syphilis, though it now seems more likely that he was suffering from a slowly developing brain tumour.)

  Like Kierkegaard and Rousseau, Nietzsche found walking therapeutic. In fact, his need of it seems to have been even greater than theirs.

  For example, during the 1880s, Nietzsche rented a room, most summers, in a house in Sils-Maria, high in the Swiss Alps. While there, health and weather permitting, he would go for two brisk walks each day: a two-hour walk before lunch, and an even longer one after lunch.

  These walks, through the forest or along the shores of Lake Silvaplana or Lake Sils, seem to have been necessary for his physical and mental wellbeing. But they were equally necessary for his creativity and inspiration.

  As he walked, he would think. And, as thoughts occurred to him, he would jot them down in a notebook. This method of composition gave his philosophy and his writing a very distinctive character. It gave them a boldness and a free-spiritedness that would have been absent had he remained at his desk.

  Indeed, Nietzsche went so far as to claim that thinking-while-walking was the only way to do philosophy. In his book Twilight of the Idols, which he composed in Sils-Maria in the summer of 1888, he wrote: ‘A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.’

  In his earlier book The Gay Science, he criticized the practice of thinking and writing indoors, hemmed in by narrow walls and low ceilings ‘with compressed belly and head bent over paper’. Such surroundings and such a postu
re, he claimed, can give rise only to stale, constipated thoughts.

  He wrote: ‘It is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful.’

  Like Dickens, Russell, and Nietzsche, I too – in my own small way – can testify to the link between walking and creativity.

  For me, JoGLE wasn’t entirely a holiday. I had very little in the way of work to do, but I did have to produce my ‘Living’ column for Singapore’s national newspaper, The Straits Times, once a fortnight.

  Generally, I find writing it – or, indeed, writing anything – very hard work. I dither about, and suffer crises of confidence, and stare at a blank screen, and go over and over the same few lines without making any actual progress, and generally have a difficult time of it.

  But during JoGLE, I wrote more quickly and easily than I have ever written before. I dashed off my column, which normally takes me anything between eight and twelve hours, in just three or four hours – and that while lying in a backpacker tent with no laptop.

  The reason was simple. Although I gave no specific thought to my column as I walked, and although I didn’t consciously set out to think about anything at all, my mind was constantly turning over thoughts and ideas.

  Like Tolstoy’s Pierre, my soul was occupied every day with things ‘important and comforting’, and so I always had something worthwhile to share.

  At Drymen, we camped on a rough-and-ready farm campsite, and then set off, the next morning, on the final section of the West Highland Way.

  This was a flat and easy thirteen-mile walk, which took us out of the Highlands, through some rural lowlands and into the centre of Milngavie (pronounced Millguy or Mullguy), a commuter town situated just six miles from Glasgow city centre.