The Spirit of Sauntering: Thoreau on the Art of Walking and the Perils of a Sedentary Lifestyle

A walk is the smallest sort of journey we can ever undertake. It stands in relation to a typical holiday as a bonsai tree does to a forest. But even if it is only an eight-minute interlude around the block or a few moments in a nearby park, a walk is already a journey in which many of the grander themes of travel are present.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he wrote, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.” Of course, vanishing into the woods isn’t a realistic option for most of us. Some might even say it smacks of running fr

Travelling on foot isn’t about testing your limits or exercising or hiking with a tent on your back. It’s about moving through a landscape, embarking on a process of discovery, with no shelter at hand. My voyages on foot – wandering out into the world unprotected – have always been essential experiences for me. For hours during my walk around Germa

As Nietzsche would later say: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”