Take walks to experience life and fuel your creative inspiration.

It’s been one of those days. You are creatively blocked. No juices flowing. No ideas. Your mind spins in an endless loop, going nowhere. The canvas stays blank. The strings on your guitar sound flat. The cursor blinks at you with a sneer.

This is what creative paralysis feels like. Being locked inside your skull, unable to move.

I want to suggest an age old solution to your creative block: go on a walk.

There’s an old saying, attributed to the Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic: solvitur ambulando. “It is solved by walking.”

We all know walking is good for us. If you spend your days at a desk, you’ve been told to stand more, to stretch, to “get in your steps.” But walking isn’t just exercise. It is fuel for creativity.

Writer Ryan Holiday, from whom I first learned of the saying solvitur ambulando, runs every morning to clear his mind.

Cal Newport, computer science professor and writer, takes long walks he calls “productive meditation,” using them to think through his hardest problems.

History also gives us many examples.

Charles Dickens was an obsessive walker. He logged twelve miles a day through London’s streets. “If I couldn’t walk fast and far,” he confessed, “I should just explode and perish.”

Carl Jung worked out many of his theories while walking the woods near his cabin at Bollingen.

Virginia Woolf centered herself through long walks in London and Sussex, writing: “I walk myself calm, walk myself serene.” Her novel Mrs. Dalloway unfolds as a single day’s walk.

William Wordsworth walked an estimated 175,000 miles in his lifetime, enough to circle the earth seven times. His Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (one of my favorite poems) distills the meditations of one such walk at age 28.

​Many composers were known to walk, and Beethoven was a famous wanderer. After working intensely in the morning, he would take vigorous walks. Through Vienna. Through the woods. He was a creative wanderer. As his hearing failed, his walks became even more essential—an external silence feeding an internal journey of sound.

The “wanderer” is a theme of art as well. Franz Schubert wrote a song, “Der Wanderer,” and later composed the “Wanderer” Fantasy (D. 760), one of his celebrated piano works. Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, “The Wanderer Above the Mist,” captures the sublime feeling that was a signature of Romantic art.

Walking reminds us that to create anything, to create art especially, one must engage in the world around us. The world beyond our own minds.

Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow, as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper.”

And this isn’t just lore. Research shows that walking can boost creative output by as much as 60 percent. Stanford researchers Marily Oppezzo and David Schwartz did a series of experiments that showed that walking boosted creative inspiration.

So the next time you’re staring down the blank page, the silent rehearsal room, or the dead-end canvas—don’t force it. Step outside. Move your legs. Let your inspiration catch up.

It might just be solved by walking.

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