Great thinkers love walking. This retired prof explains why you should do it, too

"If one just keeps on walking, everything will be alright," Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in a letter to his niece in 1847.

It's a sentiment that couldn't resonate more with retired Kamloops university philosophy professor Bruce Baugh who, in November, published a book examining how this simple outdoor activity helped shape the works of prominent thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir.

The Thompson Rivers University alum says a random walk is a path to mental health and creativity.

CBC's Daybreak Kamloops host Shelley Joyce walked with Baugh to find out why some of the world's greatest minds love walking.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

What is it about philosophers and walking? Why is walking so important to you? 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau said the only way that he can get his mind moving was to get his body moving.

I think that's true for a lot of philosophers — they do their best thinking while they're walking. They would go walking, would have these little notebooks in their pockets writing down all their ideas, and then they would transcribe them when they got home. 

The thing about walking is that it puts you in a kind of meditative state where your mind is free to go off in all kinds of different directions, and that sort of divergent thinking allows for a lot more creativity.

You're not stuck in your usual rut, and you come up with new ideas and creative solutions. I found that, in my own practice, when I was stuck in some piece of writing in the book, I'd go out for a long walk.

Where do you like to walk? 

I love walking down in Riverside Park and over to Pioneer Park. I like walking up Peterson Creek. I used to walk regularly from my house on Battle Street up to the university.

That was a wonderful sort of daily practice, because I'd leave the house and I'd be thinking about all the household chores and things that I had to take care of, and about halfway up the hill, I'd be thinking about what I was going to be teaching and philosophical ideas. It made for this wonderful kind of transition.

I like walking in all kinds of places. I like walking in the country, I like walking in the mountains, I like walking in cities. It's a matter of all the different sights, sounds, smells and experiences you can have, as well as encounters with other people, with whom you can have some unexpected and unpredictable interaction that will help stimulate your creativity. 

For me, one of the great things about walking is that it enables you to really absorb and take in what's going on around you. The difference between walking to the university and driving to the university is tremendous.

Being in an open space where the wind went through, or being in a sheltered space in the winter, you're really aware of that.

There are so many different things that you get a fine-grained perception of when you're walking, whereas if you're in a car encased in metal and glass, you just zip right through and don't notice a thing.

Do you like to walk slower or faster?

I like to walk slowly. If I'm walking in a hurry, it means that I really need to get somewhere — that's not my favourite kind of walk. My favourite kind of walk is meandering where I can go, in any number of different ways to get to where I'm going. Or maybe I don't have a destination at all. In that kind of free-flowing walk, I find that my thoughts are also more free-flowing. I like the spontaneity of not having a fixed destination and not having a fixed time that I have to arrive there.