Get Outside and Walk
A local man told my son-in-law, "We call your father-in-law 'The Walker.'"
He might as well have said they call me "The Well Hung," I was so pleased.
When Wittgenstein quit Cambridge and moved to Ireland, he walked. And walked. Then walked some more. He carried a notebook with him and would stop periodically to jot down notes. A neighbor once saw him plopped in a ditch and writing furiously, oblivious to anything around him.
Crazy shit goes down when you're walking. The stylistically steroidal Nietzsche might have said it best:
"Now I’ve got you, you nihilist! Sitting on your arse is precisely the sin against the Holy Ghost. Only those thoughts that come in walking have any value."
Walking and valuable thinking go together like Hollywood casting parties and cocaine.
Motorcycle mechanic Robert Pirsig didn't much care for driving in a car, saying that, by contrast, a motorcycle offers a sensory experience: "You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming."
His description parallels the experience of walking: "the sense of presence is overwhelming." Bonus: the sense of presence isn't hitting the walker at 70 mph with no way of taking notes.
That "sense of presence" is a tactile thing. It bombards the senses. The senses in turn feed the mind, which produces valuable thoughts.
"Valuable" thoughts. That's the rub here. Thoughts are cheaper than crack whores, but valuable thoughts? They're the high-priced call girls of the mental life.
The tactile experience of walking leads to valuable thoughts, the ones that drive you into the ditch so you can write them down.
Contrast those thoughts with the ones that materialize out of nowhere and from nothing: those concoctions of your brain. They don't grow in soil. They grow in nothing and produce nothing, except worries, frustrations, fears, and more baseless fantasies than a George MacDonald story on peyote.
This radical difference between thoughts grown from senses and thoughts grown from our brains itself debunks the whole modern mindset.
We're all Cartesians these days. Rationalism is embedded in our mental landscape of presumptions, less movable than that 500-pound woman who had to be lifted from her living room with a crane. As a result, we believe our minds churn out gold ex nihilo.
But that belief is more false than the town harlot you thought was your chaste maiden.
Our minds need the body to produce valuable thoughts. It's because we're sacramental--body and soul intertwined--and the world is sacramental--spirit and material breathing together.
Nothing brings them together better than the tactile experience of walking.