Solvitur
ambulando is a Latin phrase meaning “it is solved by walking.” According
to legend it was first uttered by the Greek philosopher Diogenes. After
listening patiently to another philosopher’s ridiculous “proof” that motion was
impossible, Diogenes simply got up and walked away, muttering “solvitur ambulando.” If ancient Greeks
had mics, that’d be a mic drop.
Since then, solvitur
ambulando has taken on a much wider meaning. Countless poets, essayists,
and philosophers have cited the aphorism as proof of the benefit of a robust
walk. But its usefulness extends even beyond that.
Human beings evolved on their feet. For hundreds of
thousands of years we walked everywhere, all day, every day. Our bodies were
designed to move. And yet in this mechanized age we sit for hours at a time,
often all day, walking only to get another cup of coffee, or pee the last one
out. And it’s killing us – obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and a host of
other problems shorten our lives. After centuries of increasing
life-expectancy, we are the first generation in a long, long time to die sooner
than our ancestors. As health experts put it, sitting is the new smoking.
Beyond physical wellness, walking significantly improves
our mental health. Depression, anxiety, and other maladies of the mind shrink
beneath the grandeur of a wide open sky. There’s something about leaving the
confines of your four walls and stepping out onto the path through your
village. Whether on a nature trail, a suburban lane, or a downtown street,
walking reintroduces you to the community of things – the world that gave birth
to you and everything you know, everything you see, everything you feel, and
everything you are. Coming out of isolation and sauntering far afield brings
you home to yourself.
Walking through my neighborhood the other day I bumped
into a neighbor I hadn’t seen in three years. We had a lot of catching up to
do. Thirty minutes later I felt as though I’d read an entire novel rich with
pathos, grief, recognition, and laughter – and I’ll wager she felt the same. We
need each other. We build each other. We are each other. I felt deeply my own
sorrows and joys in hers. The rain-wet sidewalk, the bare winter trees, and the
leaden sky felt warm and safe. I was at home in my own skin, and in this
beautiful, painful, hopeful world. By coming to know strangers, we are no longer
strangers to ourselves.
And so we come to the deeper meaning of solvitur ambulando – that there is
wordless healing in ambulation, that is, movement. We overestimate our
intellectual capacity to solve all of our problems at the level of thought. Rational
discourse, refined conceptual thinking, and intellectual discernment yield many
fruits. But they have limits. When it comes to the really big problems – the
meaning of life, death, love, and everything in between – we can’t think our
way out of a wet paper bag. When words and thoughts fail us, take to your feet.
Move. Feel the problem shift, soften, open, and dissolve all on its own. I
don’t know why it works. It just does.
In an even broader sense, solvitur ambulando conveys the power of embodiment – that wisdom
isn’t something you know, it’s
something you are. Truth-claims made
by others, no matter how compelling, shimmer and fade like ghosts until you
test them in the laboratory of your own life. Only through action does the
truth take form.
You
don’t understand cooking until you cook. You don’t taste the challenges and joys
of marriage until you walk down the aisle. You can’t criticize the creative
product of another until you’ve dared to risk offering your own creation on the
same stage. Only when we walk the walk do we earn the right to talk.
Even our moral positions benefit from the deep-tissue
empathy of embodiment. Until you have faced an unwanted pregnancy yourself,
your position on the legality or morality of abortion falls short, no matter
how learned or principled. Good people disagree on the rectitude of terminating
pregnancies. But until you live it, your words carry the taint of sanctimony and
grandstanding.
Out beyond the platitudes of the sermon or the
pronouncements of the lecture hall there is a messy world of complicated
interconnections, wordless realizations, and untraceable sensibilities. We
ought to learn how to do better at leaving each other alone to the authority of
our own embodied knowing. Life is hard. We make it harder by interfering with
the natural pathway wisdom often travels – the inner road of our
soul-wanderings.
As each of us walks through this world, we see what we see,
feel what we feel, and come to know what we come to know – by walking. In the
alchemy of time, substantive wisdom arises like steam from the cauldron of our
suffering. Life is going to hurt. There is no short cut. You have to walk right
through the fire.
Get a dog. The rescue shelters are full of them. Bring
one home. Walk her every day, rain or shine, whether you feel like it or not.
Let a dog reconnect you to your neighborhood, your neighbors, the natural
world, and your own latent joy. There are clouds to trace, fields to cross, and
trees to interlace with your meandering. There are shores along the lake or sea
that never show themselves the same way twice.
In high school I sometimes struggled to pay attention to
my teachers. My mind often wandered. (How ironic that I would one day become a
teacher myself, my work as a lecturer deeply informed by the lived experience
of how boring school can be). One night, while trying to do my homework, I
chanced upon a poem by Walt Whitman called “When I Heard the Learn’d
Astronomer.” I felt as though I’d been hit by lightning.
When I heard the
learn’d astronomer
When the proofs, the figures, were
ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and
diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer
where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became
tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I
wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and
from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the
stars.
I closed my book, turned off the light, and went for a
walk through the silent darkness of my sleepy suburban neighborhood. I never
did finish that homework assignment. Whatever problem I was working on remains
unsolved, by me anyway. But I have a feeling it solved itself.
Ultimately, you cannot receive truth second hand. What
another proclaims, I must experience myself. So it is that the best advice
often falls on deaf ears. Until you have the ears to hear, the most beautiful
words are nothing more than clanging cymbals.
