Who said solvitur ambulando

Thich Nhat Hanh contends that mindful walking connects us to all that is working instead, in our minds, bodies, and the environment around us. Each time we do that, he argues, we heal the world and ourselves. Instead, walk off your woes and stride toward inspiration, like the 18th-century composer Ludwig van Beethoven, whose daily noontime constitutional was integral to his creative process.

It may be the key to unlocking your genius. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. This goes without saying. I am an animal, I know it. Beneath our thin veneer of spirituality and intellect, we are beasts.

I, of course, know people who have close emotional relationships with dogs. Some of them sleep with their dogs. I also know people who imagine they have an emotional relationship with a cat but the cat knows better. I never formed those friendships because my dad was a farmboy and our dog Cappy was an outdoor dog whose job it was to keep foxes from eating the chickens and raccoons out of the sweet corn.

He slept in the garage. Dogs had jobs back then. Lassie rescued small children from quicksand. Rin Tin Tin was part of the war effort. My aunt had a little poodle, basically a pillow who pooped, and Dad knew that she slept with the dog and to him this was a shameful thing, not to be spoken of.

The pig research, and other medical advances, are motivated by the urge toward longevity that my generation feels keenly, a desire to venture into the 90s. My grandfathers died at age 73, which probably seemed long enough to them, life being less of a picnic in the early 20th, but my confreres, whom I saw at a class reunion in September, seem rather immature compared to how old people used to be and are eager to see more of the world and if some pig parts would facilitate that, my friends would be agreeable.

To me, the 90s are foreign territory, like going to Eritrea. I never met an Eritrean, I know nothing about the place. He has turned He left me a voice mail message the other day. He and Gloria are fine. I love October and I hate to see it pass so quickly. My love and I ate dinner outdoors last Friday and it felt like the Last Time and as an old man I find Lasts rather painful.

It pains me to see the wave of puritanism in the arts, arts organizations competing to see who can write the most militant mission statements declaring their dedication to Equality and Inclusivity and Anti-Elitism, which tells me clearly that the end is near. Art is elitist because some people are better singers than almost anyone else and some plays astonish and others only fill the time, and if equality is now the goal, then where do we go to experience the extraordinary?

Art then becomes ideology, and for astonishment we must wait for the next blizzard or thunderstorm. A Manhattan thunderstorm is worth waiting for, but still. We have a long haul ahead of us, people. Children dressed up as malevolent beings for Halloween: is this a good thing? I doubt it. Anything you do to turkey is an improvement: stuff it with jellybeans, pour brandy on it and light it on fire — better yet, put some cherry bombs in it and blow it up.

November is a hard month, and then comes the typhoon of commercial Christmas joy that makes the day itself such a letdown, after all the ecstatic families in Best Buy commercials you have to face your own grumpy brood. This is why we need to enjoy what little is left of this gorgeous month of October. The cure for the blues, as we all know, is to get outdoors and walk around and pay attention to the world. And one day, unintentionally, simply because it was there, I walked up the steps into a library and a room of long tables with green study lamps and young people studying math and writing term papers on their laptops, no chatter, no video games, all business, the children of cabdrivers and cleaning ladies and the ladies at the nail salon.

Look no further. The future is in this room, studying. More recently, in Wanderlust , author Rebecca Solnit noted the connection between the act of walking and how we experience the world. This touches on a concept I became fascinated with during a trip to Japan this past spring. For someone interested in traditions and spiritual practices that intersect with mindfulness, Japan is, of course, an amazing place -- from the elaborate tea ceremonies to the ubiquitous local shrines.

But one that I was particularly captivated by was the importance in the Japanese aesthetic of the concept Ma , which can be loosely translated as the essential space or interval between things that exists most fully when it's experienced.

By walking we move through the world not just physically, but also spiritually. Often by "taking a walk" we mean that we're not walking to get anywhere in particular. But even when we are walking toward a destination, when we're walking to connect two places, the in-between -- the space, the interval -- can be more important.

Space is substance. Giacometti sculpted by "taking the fat off space. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses Isaac Stern described music as "that little bit between each note -- silences which give the form.

Walking is how we move through our world; language and writing are how we articulate that experience. But to fully experience the world around us, we first have to be able to free ourselves from the distractions that are constantly begging for our attention.

Even the supremely focused Henry David Thoreau struggled to stay in the moment:. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society.

But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is -- I am out of my senses What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? Since Thoreau's time, the village has grown exponentially bigger and become more intrusive and seemingly intimate -- giving us the semblance of connection without any of the real benefits of connection. Technology has enabled the village to become exceptionally good at not allowing us to shake it off.

With the advent of the smartphone, getting away from it all is no longer as easy as simply getting up and walking away. And, increasingly, people are making the choice not to even try to shake off the village -- surrendering to a life of distractions, with the result that, as Thoreau put it, we are living much of our lives out of our senses. Wayne Curtis calls them "the digital dead[,] shuffling slowly, their eyes affixed to a small screen in their hands. The study found that one in three pedestrians were distracted, by either typing or talking on a phone or with earbuds in their ears.

I found another use, in amidst a lot of Christian argumentation Moule , where the writer said solvitur ambulando cum Deo , "it is solved by walking with God"; but no precedent was given, so I don't know if he was just expanding it off his own bat or had a genuine precedent for this expansion.

This is quite another meaning: walking in the path of righteousness, putting yourself in God's hands, and so on. Nothing to do with Zeno's problem of motion , or the refreshment of the outdoors. Probably unlikely to be the true meaning of the original phrase, but where that has been lost, piled up under long centuries of re-quotation and re-application, it's hard to know. Moule, , Outline of Christian Doctrine , at www.

A Latin phrase meaning "it is solved by walking ", whose origin and whose original meaning are, apparently, not clearly known.