Put Down All Devices and Walk

Pedestrian: a word fitted to the most drab, tedious and monotonous moments of life. We don’t want to live pedestrian lives. Yet maybe we should. Many of history’s great thinkers have been pedestrians. Henry David Thoreau and William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Mahatma Gandhi, William James – all were writers who hinged the working of their minds to the steady movement of their feet. They felt the need to get up and get the blood moving, leaving the page to put on a hat and go outside for a stroll. In doing so, they were in step with the antipodal forces of motion and rest, an impetus written into the laws of nature.