Step away from the keyboard!

I love walking. Not your power or ultra extreme stuff, just your straightforward amble in a wood or meander along a shore. But until not so long ago, I used to feel guilty whenever I set off. If I was walking, I wasn't writing. This meant valuable creative time was being wasted. Now I know this was the thinking of the ill-informed. 

Let me explain. As you all probably know, walking makes the heart pump faster. The faster the heart pumps, the more blood and oxygen is sent to the muscles and the organs, including the brain. This helps keep us fit and healthy, and fit is always good. But guess what? Regular walking also promotes new connections between brain cells. These connections stave off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age and increase the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), elevating levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them. What’s not to like about preventing brain tissue from withering at any age, but especially if you are a tad older, like me?

And there's more. As we saunter alongside that murmuring brook, or stroll through that wooded glade, our mind is free to float from one sensory experience to another and our “attention” is replenished. You see, it turns out that “attention” is a limited resource. It drains throughout the day, and especially after concentrated effort, like writing a book for six hours. Sleeping helps replenish attention, of course, but so does walking, especially walking in a park or forest. In Japan they call walking in green spaces ‘Shinrinyoku’ or ‘forest bathing’. It’s a recognised relaxation and stress management activity. 

Better still, allowing our mind to wander and drift, or daydream, is also believed to stimulate our slumbering creative subconscious, the place where ideas come from. It's got to be one of the great paradoxes of being a writer that while it involves hard work and concentrated effort, the light bulb moments tend to come when we are are not focusing on being creative. Ray Bradbury explained this rather neatly in his book, Zen in the Art of Writing, when he said you have to treat the finding of ideas in the same way you treat cats: “If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won’t let you do it. You’ve got to say, ‘Well, to hell with you.’ And the cat says, ‘Wait a minute. He’s not behaving the way most humans do.’ Then the cat follows you out of curiosity.” 

So, it turns out that stepping away from my keyboard and going out for a walk is as helpful for my writing as keeping the seat of my pants to my writing chair. To be honest, I'm not surprised. I've always known that if I go for a walk, especially when I'm stumped, ideas will suddenly appear. As Henry David Thoreau once famously said, “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”

What about you?  Do you turn to walking for inspiration or do you prefer to stay put and daydream, or something else?