When you walk and do it correctly (i.e., present with the world around you and experience), you train your mind to function outside of the scaffolding of books.
Reading books is still important. It connect us with the past and with established knowledge. But we should never neglect adventurous thinking—i.e., doing our own thinking, which is facilitated by the act of going outdoors where books are not accessible. There we get out of the influence of esablished thought.
Original thinking does not always mean discovering ambitious, grounbreaking ideas. In its simplest, most accessible form, original thinking is simply this: applying a piece of knowledge to oneself, or discovering one’s personal preferences and subjective truth. One can only do this if one is prepare to get out of established knowlege, a lot of which, we have used to barricade ourselves from growth
Related
References
Gros, F. (2014). A Philosophy of Walking. Verso.
Among the sources of morning, we find the West. The East is where our memory resides: the East is culture and books, history and old defeats. There is nothing to be learned from the past, because learning from that means repeating former errors. That is why one shouldn’t put one’s trust in old people, or settle for their so-called experience which is nothing but the weighty mass of their repeated mistakes. One should trust only confidence itself: youth. The sources of the future lie in the West.
‘We go eastward to realize history, and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race, – we go
westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.’
The West is a lode, the preparation of the future, a resource of being, the unopened, the ever new. But the West is also The Wild. The Wild is unexploited, virgin Nature, a primary, inhuman force (and non-academic: few poets, Thoreau says, know how to depict ‘the west side of the mountains’), but it is also the undaunted, rebellious part of us, the part that hasn’t given up on living: pure affirmation.
to reinvent ourselves, we must find within us, under the pack-ice of received certainties and immobile opinions, the current of the wild, the one that wells up, escapes, overflows. We are prisoners of ourselves. People talk of the tyranny of public opinion, but that is nothing, Thoreau says, compared to personal opinion. We are shackled by our own judgements. Thoreau walked (towards the West, but one always heads westward when walking properly) not to find himself, but always to be in a position to reinvent himself.