We have started the year with some excellent sessions of mindfulness from Susie and Katie that have returned us to our practices and provided deeper insight into the reason why these simple routines can be so powerful. This short article from Open Link, How Walking Fosters Creativity: Stanford Researchers Confirm What Philosophers and Writers Have Always Known, shows how walking can stimulate creative thought.
"A certain Zen proverb goes something like this: "A five-year-old can understand it, but an 80-year-old cannot do it." The subject of this riddle-like saying has been described as "mindfulness"---or being absorbed at the moment, free from routine mental habits. In many Eastern meditative traditions, one can achieve such a state by walking just as well as by sitting still—and many a poet and teacher has preferred the ambulatory method.
This is equally so in the West, where we have an entire school of ancient philosophy—the "peripatetic"—that derives from Aristotle and his contemporaries' penchant for doing their best work while in leisurely motion. Friedrich Nietzsche, an almost fanatical walker, once wrote, "all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." Nietzsche's mountain walks were athletic, but walking---Frédéric Gros maintains in his A Philosophy of Walking---is not a sport; it is "the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found."Gros discusses the centrality of walking in the lives of Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Kant, Rousseau, and Thoreau. Likewise, Rebecca Solnit has profiled the essential walks of literary figures such as William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Gary Snyder in her book Wanderlust, which argues for the necessity of walking in our own age, when doing so is almost entirely unnecessary most of the time. As great walkers of the past and present have made abundantly clear—anecdotally at least—we observe a significant link between walking and creative thinking.More generally, writes Ferris Jabr in The New Yorker, "the way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa." Applying modern research methods to ancient wisdom has allowed psychologists to quantify the ways in which this happens, and to begin to explain the reasons why. Jabr summarizes the experiments of two Stanford walking researchers, Marily Oppezzo and her mentor Daniel Schwartz, who found that almost two hundred students tested showed markedly heightened creative abilities while walking. Walking, Jabr writes in poetic terms, works by "setting the mind adrift on a frothing sea of thought." (Hear Dr. Oppezzo discuss her study in a Minnesota public radio interview above.)Oppezzo and Schwartz speculate that "future studies would likely determine a complex pathway that extends from the physical act of walking to physiological changes to the cognitive control of imagination." They recognize that this discovery must also account for such variables as when one walks, and—as so many notable walkers have stressed—where. Researchers at the University of Michigan have approached the where question in a paper titled "The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature" that documents a study in which, writes Jabr, "students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets."One wonders what James Joyce—whose Ulysses is built almost entirely on a scaffolding of walks around Dublin—would make of this. Or Walter Benjamin, whose concept of the flâneur, an archetypal urban wanderer, derives directly from the insights of that most imaginative decadent poet, Charles Baudelaire. Classical walkers, Romantic walkers, Modernist walkers—all recognized the creative importance of this simple movement in time and space, one we work so hard to master in our first years, and sometimes lose in later life if we acquire it. Going for a walk, contemporary research confirms---a mundane activity far too easily taken for granted---may be one of the most salutary means of achieving states of enlightenment, literary, philosophical, or otherwise, whether we roam through ancient forests, over the Alps, or to the corner store."
Recently the Dalai Lama has been the center of controversy following a couple of things that he said about woman and immigration. Having read several of the Dalai Lama's books and been enchanted by his vision and way of thinking I found it quite strange that so many people were being so judgemental about what had been said and took so little time to place it in any sort of context. It makes me smile to think that the Dalai Lama's words could be so focused upon when he has expressed so many beautiful and wise words that can help guide us through our lives and define his deeper thoughts.
“…a truly compassionate attitude toward others does not change even if they behave negatively. Genuine compassion is based not on our own projections and expectations, but rather on the needs of the other: irrespective of whether another person is a close friend or an enemy, as long as that person wishes for peace and happiness and wishes to overcome suffering, then on that basis we develop genuine concern for their problem. This is genuine compassion…the goal is to develop this genuine compassion, this genuine wish for the well-being of another, in fact for every living being throughout the universe.”
I no longer tweet because something I tweeted was taken out of context, caused others to suffer on my behalf and for others to express anger and unhappiness at my words. The world can do without my tweets but I do hope that the Dalai Lama does not stop sharing his great wisdom especially on happiness and living a good life. The reason I am sharing this is that as we start the new school we do need to remember that many of our students and families are not native English speakers and come from different cultural backgrounds. At times we may be surprised or shocked by conversations or communications, but unlike journalism, it is our responsibility to dig deep and find true meaning. This Ph.D. student, Tenzin, decided to do just that in her article and I think there is much we can learn from her writing.
The final part of this post is a talk by David Brooks that asks us to dig deep into who we are and links closely to what we aspire to as a school. Last year I watched his talk on cv against eulogy, this encouraged me to read his book, The Road to Character which I found very enlightening. This TED talk asks very big questions about society and the need for change. In a year when one of our focuses for professional development relates to service-learning, an obvious question arising from this talk is: Can we create weavers out of our students?
"Our society is in the midst of a social crisis, says op-ed columnist and author David Brooks: we're trapped in a valley of isolation and fragmentation. How do we find our way out? Based on his travels across the United States -- and his meetings with a range of exceptional people known as "weavers" -- Brooks lays out his vision for a cultural revolution that empowers us all to lead lives of greater meaning, purpose and joy."
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