All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking. — Friedrich Nietzsche

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

Insight: There's something about walking that loosens the mind in ways sitting at a desk never does. When your body moves with a rhythm, your thoughts seem to follow that same cadence—they're no longer stuck, grinding against the same problem. Nietzsche knew this from experience; he spent hours wandering through the Swiss and Italian countryside, and some of his most penetrating ideas emerged from those solitary walks. But the insight isn't really about being outdoors, though that helps. It's about how movement and thinking are mysteriously linked. The reason this matters now is that most of us have made thinking into something we do while sitting still—at computers, in meetings, hunched over our phones. We treat the body as just a vessel for the brain. Yet anyone who's solved a nagging problem during a commute, or worked through an emotional tangle while taking a walk knows that Nietzsche had a point. The movement itself seems to shake something loose. Not every thought needs to be "great," but the best ones—the ones that cut through confusion or reveal something we've been missing—often come when we stop trying so hard and let our feet do the thinking too.

Source: Twilight of the Idols, 'Maxims and Arrows' section, 33, 1889