Creative Fridays: Take a Walk

Tactic 001 — Take a Walk

For most people, the healthiest, cheapest, and most expedient way to increase your creativity is to take a walk. After just a few minutes of walking, your brain chemistry shifts, your mood elevates, and your creativity starts to emerge from that tight small ball that’s been locked in a secret part of your heart to form an expansive thought-mist that extends into the space around you, travels down the street, up into the sky, into every open window and and connects you to all ideas past, present, real, or imagined. A walk opens your options to unbounded creation. A walk gets your thoughts going. A walk moves your mind.

Walking for improved creativity and cognition has a long history: Aristotle’s students were called the peripatetics (peripatêtikos, means “given to walking about”), because they walked while they talked as a way to work out their ideas.

New York Times Best-selling author (and Nobel prize winner) Daniel Kahneman famously worked out his work on decision-making and behavioral economics by taking long walks and talking with his collaborators.

Charles Darwin built a gravel path at his home specifically designed for thought-walking. He named the path “The Sandwalk” and treated himself to multiple major walking sessions each day. He would place a pile of flint stones on the edge of the path and would knock one away for each lap so he could track the distance (and estimate the time) without interrupting his flow. He called difficult problems “three-flint problems” or “four-flint problems.” Most of On the Origin of Species was worked out pacing along The Sandwalk.

Nietzsche believed “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” During his most productive periods, he would walk up to 8 hours a day. The Wanderer and His Shadow was written almost entirely on foot scribed into six little pocket notebooks he carried with him. Thus spake Nietzsche, “Es ist mehr Vernunft in deinem Leibe, als in deiner besten Weisheit.” (“There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.”) and it seems that walking was a way he could access this special type of reasoning.

Kierkegaard, who more or less invented existentialism and gave us anti-Hallmark mic-drops like “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” wrote to his sister-in-law: “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.”

Time for a Field Test:

I was feeling down. I went for a run. I didn’t last. It didn’t help. I switched to a brisk walk, a full, fast, rhythmic walk. Ten minutes went by and I had a vision of animating this walk, not in the classic walk cycles of animation, even though I had just watched a marvelous video on walk cycles from fellow DreamWork alum James Baxter which is worth watching for anyone who might enjoy seeing how one of the best does it…

But instead of classic style walk cycles, in my mind I was framing the walk cycle from very unique camera angles, from up above, from a “low-flying drone shot locked on the profile of the shoes” and while playing with imaginary camera angles in my mind, I mentally zeroed in on the shoes. And I saw that written on the shoes were words. One shoe had “Learn” written on it, then just as it picked up out of view the second shoe came in with the word “Create” written on it.

I hadn’t planned on having words on the shoes, it surprised me to see them in my own mind’s eye. But there they were, I saw them come flying into frame as the imaginary low-flying drone camera tracked along the path… Learn… Create… step by step.

I suddenly grasped an essential part of the artists’s life… of my life… This is how we improve! We learn something new, then we create with this new knowledge… and then through the act of creating, we discover something else new from out own work (success or failure), and this new knowledge feeds into the next creation and so on.

Sometimes we uncover a whole area we need to go and learn, and sometimes we learn on the spot by examining closely our own actions. We are constantly creating from what we have learned and then learning from what we create and bringing new ideas from life into the work and ideas from our work into our lives. YES! this was interesting and helpful.

We create and learn.
We learn and create.

You Try It:

Take a walk. Give yourself at least 10 minutes. Let your mind expand to the world around you. Welcome the ideas that come. Explore, expand, develop and evolve the ideas as you walk. Find your revelation. And then once back in studio, or at your writing desk, or at the piano, embrace the two-step cycle of “Learn and Create” to bring your new ideas from the walk back into your practice.

APPENDIX of Science Links:

Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152.

• Stanford summary: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/04/walking-vs-sitting-042414

• Full PDF: https://aaalab.stanford.edu/assets/papers/2014/Give_your_ideas_some_legs.pdf

• PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24749966/

Key findings: Creative output increased by an average of 60 percent when the person was walking (source Stanford University). A person walking indoors – on a treadmill in a room facing a blank wall – or walking outdoors in the fresh air produced twice as many creative responses compared to a person sitting down (Source Stanford University). The act of walking itself, and not the environment, was the main factor. Stanford University (Source).