Who were the Inner Walkers?
Philosophers, poets, writers, musicians, and creative people of all types have been enthusiastic walkers – and for good reason. George Trevelyan, who wrote the classic History of England said of walking, ‘I never knew a man go for an honest day’s walk for whatever distance, great or small… and not have his reward in the repossession of his soul.’
Aristotle, who was known for the Peripatetic school of philosophy, would discourse with his
students whilst walking around the grounds of the Academy. Emmanuel Kant walked every afternoon, and Rousseau said of his walks, ‘Never have I thought so much, never have I realized my existence so much, I have been so much alive.’ Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and de Quincey were all inveterate walkers. It was estimated by Wordsworth’s friends that during the course of his life he walked 185,000 miles In the English Lake District, which inspired him to ’see into the heart of things’ and to write about:
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling place is the light of setting
suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
The modern Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas, has written of a similar feeling about walking in his poem, ‘The Moor’:
It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
Dickens, Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Ruskin and Jane Austen all used their walks to free the creative mind. Beethoven and Mozart both took to the woods to discover their own ‘creator spiritus’. Would Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony exist but for his walks in the Vienna woods ? Would Mozart have given us The Marriage of Figaro if he had not sought inspiration in the open air? Not only men of genius, but ordinary people, have been discovering for centuries that walking has a special quality about it.
Inner walking frees us from the tyranny of the conscious mind and lets the intuitive mind breathe.
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