"This Won’t Solve All Your Problems (Just Most of Them)"
by Ryan Holiday
"In March 2025, we found two ten-week old puppies dumped on the road near where we live out in the country. One was white with spots. The other was mostly black with some white on her chest and paws. Both were emaciated, covered in flea bites, and scared of the thunderstorm that was just starting.
We took them home and as you can imagine our kids begged for us to keep them. I remembered many years ago reading about “the black dog bias” - that for some reason darker dogs are considered scarier and less likely to be adopted - so we decided to keep that one and found a home, almost immediately for the other.
It was a good thing because my kids had fallen in love with “Oreo.” Like every parent of all time, I was assured that they would take care of her and walk her. And like every kid who has ever made that promise, mine have not exactly followed through. But I’m not mad, because it means I have to take her for two walks a day (on occasion I succeed in bribing or threatening the boys to come too). Of all the ways Oreo has changed our lives, that’s been the best part. She’s “forced” me to do more of something I love to do. Something I know is really good for me, for anyone.
Walking is good exercise, of course. It burns calories. You get vitamin D from the sun. If the research is correct, apparently getting several thousand steps a day comes with all sorts of benefits for your health and longevity. But I don’t care about any of that. I don’t mind those things, but I walk for the philosophical and psychological benefits.
For centuries, thinkers have walked many miles a day because they had to, because they were bored, because they wanted to escape the putrid cities they lived in, because they wanted to get their blood flowing. In the process they discovered an important side-effect: it cleared their minds and helped them make better work. Literally, the name for the students of Aristotle was the Peripatetics - from the Greek peripatein, “to walk about” - because he did most of his teaching on walks.
Nietzsche’s, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" came to him on a long walk. As he would later say: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” The choreographer Twyla Tharp talks about going for “mindless mental wanderings” each day. Ernest Hemingway would walk along the Paris quais whenever his writing stalled. Charles Darwin built several walks into his daily schedule. The poet William Wordsworth walked as many as 180,000 miles in his lifetime - an average of six and a half miles a day since he was five years old!
Even spiritual revelations seem to come on foot. Dorothy Day was a lifelong walker, and it was on her strolls along the beach on Staten Island in the 1920s that she first began to feel a strong sense of God in her life and the first flickerings of the awakening that would put her on a path toward sainthood. It’s probably not a coincidence that Jesus himself was a walker - a traveler—who knew the pleasures and the divineness of putting one foot in front of the other. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that many of the greatest expressions of faith and devotion involve long walks (i.e. pilgrimages) to holy sites around the globe.
The Buddhists speak of “walking meditation,” or kinhin, where movement after long periods of sitting, particularly through beautiful settings, can unlock a different kind of stillness than traditional meditation. In a beautiful letter to his bedridden and depressed sister-in-law, Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. 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, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
In my life, I’ve been repeatedly gifted with ideas - from the muses, from my own subconscious, I don’t know—on walks. It was on a walk in Bastrop State Park with the kids when I got the idea for "The Stoic Virtue Series." I’ve solved business problems and personal problems on walks. My wife can recognize it in my eyes and knows not to say anything when I return from a walk, rushing into the house and heading to the pile of notecards I have on the counter at all times. He’s probably come up with something…don’t interrupt or he’ll lose it and be a mess after.
I’ll tell you what I’ve almost never thought - except a couple of times in the Texas summer - I have never returned from a walk and regretted it. Walks haven’t solved all my problems, but they rarely make them worse. And even when they haven’t changed anything, they’ve changed my mood - which is usually most of the problem anyway.
Sitting at our computers, we are overwhelmed with information, with emails, with one thing after another. On a walk, the mind, relieved of all those inputs, can wander, drift, reflect, process, imagine, make connections, have ideas, or simply get a little peace and quiet.
Kierkegaard tells the story of a morning when he was driven from his house in a state of despair and frustration - illness, in his words. After an hour and a half, he was finally at peace and nearly back home when he bumped into a friendly gentleman who chattered on about a number of his problems. Isn’t that how it always seems to go? No matter. “There was only one thing left for me to do,” Kierkegaard wrote, “instead of going home, to go walking again.”
And so must we. Walk. Then walk some more. Anyway, I’ve got to go now. Oreo is scratching at the door. I’ll see if the kids want to come, but either way, I’m walking."
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