Take a Walk

Transcript

I’d like to talk about taking a walk. I was having a chat with my buddy Chris the other day.

We were talking about how for awhile he had a dog he ended up giving it to family. Max, wonderful dog in some ways. Full of energy, loved to chase other dogs especially little dogs to try to attack them.

So he had his peculiarities. Max was always full of energy and always ready to have fun and of course when Chris had Max he would have to take him out for walks several times a day perhaps up to four times a day to try to tire him out and entertain him something like that.

It’s interesting when you go for a walk so many little things might happen. Going for a walk is like a little adventure, or a bit of travel.

They say its really important for creative people or even people perhaps in the sciences to travel to be inspired because sometimes you will see things that you just don’t expect.

Especially if you are being conscious and aware of your own environment. There was a certain story by a science fiction author and he was in some bar with this guy playing the tuba and the writer sees the form of the tuba and thinks: “Oh now I know how I am going to include time travel in my story, just by seeing this thing in a different context or light, suddenly he gets some inspiration and very different perspective on our own work.

We all have that opportunity. Well most places there are instances when you can’t go for a walk like Chile but many of us can leave the house at least for a bit and go for an extended walk and enjoy the sunshine and the rain, the overcast sky and see things that maybe we weren’t expecting.

I like living in Latin America and of course you do see some unusual things. If you go for a drive you never know what might get in the way. Maybe someone will block the road somehow, there’s a garbage truck or something. There’s gonna be a cyclist jutting out from nowhere or delivery man on a motorcycle.

Little unexpected things and those can provide some important fertilizer for the growth in our mind coming out to try and create something new or even just to take a break.

In terms of productivity what happens if we just allow ourselves, sink ourselves into that walking motion placing the balls of our feet and our heels carefully shifting the weight from one foot to the other becoming aware of each element of the process of walking.

And we can become more and more concious of everything. Noticing what is around you. Seeing the trees. The way that the leaves move in the trees, the colors and grass, the footpath, other people. Depends where you live some people are very friendly. Some places will say good morning to you. Some places will say good morning, how you doing and greet you with a smile and handshake.

Which is wonderful. Is that little bit of chaos that these things can introduce into our days to help get a fresh perspective. Something like when we take psychedelics.

I don’t know why it always has to go back to psychedelics.

I am reading Michael Polland’s How to Change Your Mind. In it he describes the default mode network, it’s this part of our brain kind of is just on when we aren’t focusing on anything in particular. This is a lot of the processes, just our standard habits we fall back on.

When you take psychedelics you suspend the default mode network and what happens is you open up the valve of consciousness and you take in all this information like it was new, like we didn’t know how to interpret it, as if we were children.

Again, that is if we walk in the correct way. If we walk perhaps even thinking what would it be like to see these things for the first time? As if we had no idea what a building, car, road, bicycle or asphalt was. What would it be like to have that experience?

All these things that happen when we just go for a walk.