a shoe scuffs the dust
echo of thought in the street
sky folds into stride
I walk every day. Sometimes for hours, sometimes only for a few minutes between places. The important part isn’t the distance, or the speed, or even the destination. The important part is that my feet touch the ground, and in that simple act, my mind is given permission to wander.
Walking is not exercise for me. It is a form of thinking. A way of loosening the knots that tighten invisibly throughout the day. My steps are the metronome, my thoughts the melody.
When I walk, I move at the speed of ideas.
I remember a long walk in Kyoto. It was autumn. The air smelled faintly of roasted chestnuts and damp leaves. The city was alive with motion—bicycles clattering past, shopkeepers sweeping fallen leaves from their thresholds, schoolchildren running in loose lines toward the station. I wandered without a plan, following alleys that turned and narrowed, and with each step, new thoughts appeared. Some were trivial: what to eat for dinner, which train to take tomorrow. Others arrived heavier, older: questions about why I write, about what it means to live a life worth remembering.
The streets themselves seemed to think with me. The shuffle of my shoes echoed against stone walls, and each echo opened a door inside my head.
Walking is not about moving forward so much as moving inward.
Running, on the other hand, is different.
I don’t run for exercise. I run for perspective.
When I run, I move at the speed of my breath. Each inhale and exhale sets the rhythm. Thoughts don’t sprawl the way they do when I walk. They compress. They sharpen. The mind narrows to the body: to the ache in the legs, the beating heart, the burning lungs. Ideas come too, but not in the leisurely drift of a stroll. They arrive like sparks, quick and insistent, born of the urgency of motion.
I remember a run along the Isar River in Munich, the water pale and fast beside me, the cold air stinging my lungs. My thoughts were not about distant dreams. They were about survival, rhythm, the next step. And yet in that compression, clarity appeared. I realized something about myself then: that perspective doesn’t always come from expanding outward. Sometimes it comes from narrowing down, from focusing so tightly that the noise falls away.
Both walking and running are forms of thinking. They simply follow different rhythms.
When I walk, ideas drift into view like clouds. When I run, insights flash like lightning. Walking is a river. Running is a storm.
In Bern, where I live, I often walk along the Aare. The river moves quickly, especially in spring when the snowmelt arrives, but my steps remain slow. Tourists float downstream in inflatable boats, laughing, carried by the current. I watch them while I walk upstream, my body stubborn against the flow. It feels like a metaphor for the mind: sometimes carried, sometimes resisting, but always in motion.
A few weeks ago, while walking there, I noticed an old man standing by the water. He wasn’t moving. Just standing, cane in hand, staring at the current. For a moment, I thought about stopping too, letting my walk end there. But something in me wanted to keep going, to let the rhythm of steps continue. Later, as I turned back, the man was gone. The river remained.
That is the thing about walking. It connects you to what continues, whether you stop or not.
Running has its own memories. In Slovenia, I once ran through a forest path early in the morning. The air was cold, mist curling low to the ground. My breath turned white with each exhale, clouds dissolving behind me. I remember thinking, absurdly, that I was being chased—not by a person, but by my own thoughts, pushed forward by everything I didn’t want to dwell on. The faster I ran, the quieter they became, until finally all that existed was the sound of my feet pounding against the earth.
I slowed eventually, bent over, lungs searing, and in that exhaustion there was release. The thoughts I had been running from no longer mattered. The rhythm had burned them away.
Perspective through compression.
There is no right way to move through the world. Some days call for the slow unraveling of a walk, some for the sharp urgency of a run. Both are ways of aligning body and mind, of syncing inner rhythm with the outer world.
Walking reminds me that thoughts need space. That ideas come when the pace is human, when the feet shuffle against pavement, when there is time to pause and notice the angle of the light.
Running reminds me that clarity sometimes comes only when there is no room for wandering. When the body demands attention, and the mind is forced into stillness by speed.
Both are forms of meditation, though I never call them that. They are simply how I think.
Sometimes at night, when I can’t sleep, I imagine myself walking. The sound of my steps in the dark, the rhythm of breath, the slow unfolding of ideas. Other nights, I imagine running, the world rushing past, my lungs filling and emptying until there is nothing left but the rhythm itself. In both cases, the imagination is enough to bring calm.
It makes me believe that the body carries these rhythms even when still. That walking and running leave imprints deeper than muscle, etched into the mind’s circuitry.
Life, I think, is not about speed, but about rhythm. Walking, running, pausing, breathing—they all tune us differently.
When I walk, I am moving at the speed of ideas.
When I run, I am moving at the speed of my breath.
Both are ways of listening. To the world. To myself. To the hidden spaces between thought and motion.
And perhaps that is the only real goal: not to arrive, but to keep moving. To let the rhythm of steps, slow or fast, remind you that perspective is always waiting, just a few strides ahead.
life 