There are so few holiday Mondays in life that each one is as rare and fleeting as a good Adam Sandler movie. And they usually last about as long: Here one minute, gone the next.
It is a shame, then, to waste your precious day off. You might find yourself at a shopping mall, circling a parking lot the size of Rhode Island, and ask yourself, like David Byrne, "How did I get here?" You may find yourself answering e-mails from your boss, or staring forlornly at your bank balance, or worrying that you'll never find greater purpose than a day-long marathon of Say Yes to the Dress. You may find yourself caught in a cycle of black thoughts, culminating in Mr. Byrne's existential squawk: "My God, what have I done?"
There is a solution. You could go for a walk. Writers, flaneurs, the idle and the aimless have always known about the benefits of walking to clear the brain and shore up the heart. Every day, it seems, science reinforces what we know, intuitively, to be real: Walking not only makes us healthier and stronger, but saner, calmer and more creative. Modern life might thwart us at every turn, but our feet know the truth.
The latest study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that a walk in nature is a useful antidote to the crippling cycle of negative thoughts that plague some people's brains. First, the researchers asked 38 volunteers to answer a series of questions that will be familiar to the more anxiety-prone among us ("I always seem to be 'rehashing' in my mind things I've said or done.")
After a 90-minute walk in nature or by a busy road, the questionnaire was retaken, and the part of the brain associated with "ruminations," or anxious thoughts, was examined. The people who'd walked in nature were less negative in their responses, and there was less activity in the broody bit of their brain (technically, the subgenual prefrontal cortex.) They'd walked right off the hamster wheel of self-defeat.
This can be added to the mounting evidence that walking relieves everything from stress and depression to high blood pressure. More than that, it frees the mind to wander, to drift into dim corners of the subconscious where the best ideas lie dormant, waiting to be prodded to life. "My thoughts sleep if I sit still," Montaigne wrote, a sentiment familiar to anyone who's had a eureka moment while striding along.
A 2014 Stanford study, "Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking," concluded that walking, whether outdoors or on a treadmill, opened up people's minds to new and unorthodox lines of thought. The authors recommended a nice stroll before every brainstorming session – and also that educators should rethink stillness as the default learning position.
This would not be news to those whose walking and thinking were inextricably entwined, from the ancient Greeks to Henry David Thoreau to Will Self. Thomas Hobbes carried an inkhorn in his walking stick in case he was struck by a brilliant idea, as Rebecca Solnit reveals in her lovely book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking.
As Ms. Solnit, a veteran of the bipedal wars, writes, "Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts."
And yet, as she notes, even though it's cheap, life-extending and fun, walking is hardly encouraged. Except in the most enlightened urban environments, the pedestrian is an also-ran in the race with cars (and sometimes an also-ran-over). Concerns over so-called "public safety" trump the right to wander, and areas that should be accessible are fenced off. Children are driven to school and forget that their lower appendages do, in fact, serve a useful purpose. Then there's the issue of being glued to technology while walking: The mind that is harnessed to a device is never going to roam free. No one ever shouted "eureka!" while looking at Pinterest.
The stillness that paradoxically lies at the heart of walking is a difficult thing to embrace in a culture devoted to busyness, swiftness and infinite distractions. Your feet will never get you anywhere quickly, unless you're Usain Bolt. Sometimes you set out on a walk but get waylaid, forget yourself, lose your place for a moment. That, of course, is when you find something else.