Can the simple act of walking recharge your soul?

Every one of us has a fondness for certain words, picked at random — with whimsy, not logic. My list would include “solitude”.  You may be alone or lonely due to circumstances. But solitude is a state you choose for many reasons – to be stress-free, to take a break, contemplate, or simply to chill out.  With solitude goes a simple monosyllabic word - “walk”.   

The Romans say solvitur ambulando – “it is solved by walking”. Of course, ambulando also implies ambling, happy hours of aimless wandering, without haste or any set purpose. The phrase suggests that walking can turn into meditation. But only in solitude. As we walk, the mind slips into a different level of consciousness where tangled issues are unravelled and new significations discovered. To Rainer Maria Rilke this is almost an intuitive process. As the poet walks on, even if he feels only the wind on his face, and does not reach the sunny hill ahead, he is still charged by an inner light.

Many poets have shared their walks with us, some epiphanic, a few mysterious, others wondrous. An indefatigable walker in life, William Wordsworth wanders among a “host of golden daffodils fluttering and dancing in the breeze”.  On a highland trek he passes by a “solitary highland lass reaping and singing by herself”.  And discovers how a casual walk on hill and dale can spark joyful insights.

Can a walk trigger angst and despair?  Walt Whitman knew heartbreak, he saw one of his children die, another commit suicide, a third suffer mental illness. Walking became his metaphor for life’s journey through shock, grief and urban alienation: “I have walked out in rain—and back in rain./ I have outwalked the furthest city light. / I have looked down the saddest city lane. /… I have been one acquainted with the night.”  

At the other end of the spectrum Australian aboriginals see going “walkabout” in the wilderness as the highest adventure, a rite of passage for youth. The youngster journeys for months in solitude, to achieve physical and spiritual transition/transformation. Later, the term came to be used derogatorily by white people who damned the aboriginals as lazy, capable of merely short spurts of action. But for the aboriginal, walkabout remains the act of linking sacred spaces, finding cultural roots and spiritual light.    

Even in our postmodern world, every single continent has herder, trader or hunter-gatherer communities - Romani gypsies in East Europe, African Fulani, Inuit in the Arctic regions, Gujjar, Rebari or Kuruba in India - following the trails of their ancestors. Nomads feel suffocated by the very thought of settling in a single place. Migration is a primeval act binding them to the mountains, plains, forests, and to the creatures who inhabit them.  

This week, going on a long walk on the Torrey Pines State Reserve, 1500 acres of wilderness bang in the middle of San Diego city, was to feel the throb of those primordial instincts. I saw the gnarled roots of the endangered Torrey pines cling to the fragile sandstone cliffs. The cliffs loomed over the beach below, where the Pacific ocean flings its spray.

After unusually heavy rains, the slopes blazed in spectacular super bloom bursts of golden poppies, yellow dahlias, purple nightshade, pink aster and magenta verbena. I learnt that once the indigenous Kumeyaay people (the name means “those who face water from the cliffs”) lived here, depending on local flora and fauna for food, medicine and shelter. Hunters rubbed their bodies with sage flowers to hide their human smell from the deer, women wearing tree bark skirts wove grass baskets, beside homes made of brush and deerweed. The versatile yucca plant provided food, lather for washing, fibrous thread, and needles from its pointed leaf. Kumeyaay people walked long distances back and forth,  foraging for seasonal fruit, nuts and fish.  

Walking in the land where once the Kumeyaay roamed was to remember an ancient culture that never wasted a single seed, plant, animal or insect life, never indulged in senseless slaughter, a community that believed that coyote and cougar, squirrel and quail, were not parasites or immigrants but rightful inhabitants of the land on which they lived. 

Breathing the salty air blowing through Torrey pine and chaparral bush, you realise that strolling dissolves skepticism,  ambling connects you to the earth, roaming makes you see how interconnected we are with all life forms. 
Solvitur ambulando gains a new meaning: “You may not make it to the sunny hill ahead,  but feeling the wind on your face you are charged with light”.  Walking makes you free.

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist