Jean-Jacques Rousseau is supposed to have said, “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs” (Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Available in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, and audio). Did he really mean walking helped him ruminate? I’ve read that meditation is emptying one’s mind of distractions, but, if walking was a favorite activity of philosophers, did they engage in that kind of discipline or did they walk to jump start their thinking of particular topics?

Some saw walking as a cultural act that began with Rousseau and traced it back to Greeks to legitimize it. They pointed out the school in Athens had a covered colonnade called peripatos that facilitated walking. Today we see peripatos in words like peripatetic.

Here’s a summary of the relationship between walking and philosophy:

Location	Setting	Activities	People
Athens	Grove that predated Aristotle’s school	Taught rhetoric; delivered information and ideas to public	Sophist (sophia = wisdom) philosophers
Athens	Area with shrines to Apollo and Muses	Teachers and students wandered among the classes	Called Peripatetic philosophers
Athens	Vicinity of stoa (colonnade) Greek architecture accommodated walking groups	Exchanges between teachers and students while walking	Stoic philosophers
Europe Philosophers copied the Greeks and walked	Philosophenweg (Heidelberg)	Walked to think and relax	Hegel
	Philosophendamm (Konigsberg)	To take a break from writing	Kant
	Philosopher’s Way (Copenhagen)		Kierkegaard
		Favorite activities: reading, music, walking	Nietzsche

I read some time ago that people involved in highly cognitive verbal activities like writing, teaching, and even politics, tended to take up less verbally-intense activities like painting or low level physical exertion activities like walking. In my personal experience, I’ve had ideas come to me while driving, which is very low intensity and the most physical exertion involves managing the steering wheel.

Given Rousseau’s statement, walking promotes an active mind. In fact, to call walking a cultural act is to see in it a vigorous quality that relaxes the body while invigorating the mind.