I walk my booty off. I’ve always been into walking and I regularly take long walks all over Los Angeles.
I even did so throughout part of that era where people still said that people don’t walk in Los Angeles. I’m not sure that was ever true, but it certainly hasn’t been true the past couple years. Especially now, in the land of quarantine. What else are we going to do?
Please enjoy this 30-second clip from the absolutely wonderful, if you haven’t seen it do it now, 1991 satirical romantic comedy film L.A. Story.
In my mid-twenties I called my walks “marches,” mostly because I took them to blow off the steam I’d build up from exclusively dating non-exclusive f**kboys. Although we didn’t yet have that perfectly descriptive term for them. I think we just called them assholes?
A good walk with some great music is where I do some of my best daydreamings, and also where I plant the seeds of future manifestations. To those of you who are like “scoff, I don’t believe in manifesting,” get your head out of your butt and take a look around. Imagining what you want can create what you want. What you focus on grows. Open your mind, open your life.
According to research done at Stanford, taking walks can increase your creativity by 60-81%. This is why Charles Darwin took daily walks on his “thinking path,” why Steve Jobs held walking meetings, how Beethoven composed “Symphony No. 6” while on one of his regular walks, and why Friedrich Nietzsche said, “All truly great things are conceived by walking.”
Walk to birth your ideas. You know?
Neuroscientist Shane O’Mara has written a whole book on the topic called In Praise of Walking, which I have not read, but of which I have read a quote. O’Mara is a professor of experimental brain research: stress, depression and anxiety; and learning, memory, and cognition.
He says (implies) that walking is the sh*t because:
“…there are all sorts of rhythms happening in the brain as a result of engaging in that kind of activity, and they’re absent when you’re sitting. One of the great overlooked superpowers we have is that, when we get up and walk, our senses are sharpened. Rhythms that would previously be quiet suddenly come to life, and the way our brain interacts with our body changes.”
You read that right. Walking is a superpower.
