On Your Feet
Some of the greatest creatives credit their best work to a walking routine.
Directly across the street from my home stands the trailhead to a wilderness of opportunity. Within it are miles of trails, waterfalls, canyons, and hideaways. This is my place of refuge to escape, to think, and fuel creativity. Its primitive paths wind into draws, around mountain hips, and are lined with native grass, fallen timber, and exposed rocks. The setting demands focus and attention, which in turn, offers the unexpected benefit of mental escape from daily checklists, work worries, and even current pandemic concerns.
“A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.” - Paul Dudley White, pioneer in cardiology
Wallace Stevens, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet, often composed his poems during his everyday stroll on the way into his Hartford west end office. Pioneer creative Steve Jobs would conduct meetings while walking. Poet William Wordsworth paced a gravel path while constructing rhymes. Charles Darwin famously worked out problems on what he called his “thinking path,” a walk he would take upon a gravel track near Down House, his home in Kent.
A recent study in Nature reveals an association between everyday bodily movement and total creative performance. Researchers found that creative performance was very much so associated with time spent in moderate, daily exercise. The New Yorker observed, "Because we don't have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind's theater."
Enjoy this collection of theatrical walking scenes for American cinema, then let’s get on our feet, step outside, and start creating!
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