I’ve been a fan of “walkatation” for the better part of the last decade.
It’s a word I just made up, but it is a thing.
Specifically the concatenation of “walking” and “meditation”. And it’s not totally unlike the Buddhist concept of a “walking meditation”.
I love walking so much that my wife bought me a hoodie with a penguin on it that says “Screw it, I’ll walk”.
Walking has been a way for me to not only get some movement into my day, but also to think freely.
I started this habit in graduate school, when I had a rigorous course load and was simultaneously studying for actuarial exams.
There would be times I would hit a mental wall while studying, working on a problem, or doing some coding. I’d feel completely at my wits end. Like I couldn’t cut it. Like I wasn’t cut out for this stuff.
Out of frustration I would get up and walk away. Far away. Well, at least a mile or two away.
And every single time I was on one of those walks something would click. The solution to whatever problem I was working on would be clear to me. Oftentimes, the solution wouldn’t be the exact right one, but it would further push the limits of my understanding.
While looking through the table of contents in Alex Pang’s book, “Rest”, my eyes were immediately drawn to the chapter titled “Walk”.
In this chapter, Alex says the following:
“Among creative thinkers, it provides time to clear the mind or get a fresh perspective on a problem…For many thinkers and doers, a walk is an essential part of their daily routine, a source of exercise and solitude.”
He goes on to describe the many great thinkers who have included walks in their daily routines, from Thomas Jefferson to Steve Jobs to Travis Kalanick (CEO of Uber).
Even the Nobel Prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner mentioned that walking is a way to clear the mind without abandoning the problem. He says that while walking:
“My mind immediately begins to move freely and instinctively over my subject. Ideas come rushing to my mind, without being called. Soon enough the best answer emerges from the jumble. I realize what I can do, what I should do, and what I must abandon.”
I know what you’re thinking — walking is such a common activity that inevitably someone will do it, have an amazing idea, and then attribute it all to the walk.
Fair enough. Nothing wrong with a little skepticism.
Alex goes into several studies scrutinizing the connection between walking and creativity. One of which is a widely cited study done in 2014 by researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz.
These researchers conducted a number of studies testing the effect of walking on creativity through scores on the Alternative Uses Test (AUT) and the Compound Remote Associates Test (CRA).
The AUT measures creative divergent thinking. The test involves researchers asking a subject to think of as many uses as possible for a simple object, like a brick or a shoe or a paperclip. The tests are time constrained and the uses are also assessed by their feasibility.
