Solvitur Ambulando: It Is Solved by Walking
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk" (Featuring: Zeno of Elea! Diogenes! Saint Augustine! Sir Leslie Stephens! Aristotle! Kierkegaard! Merleau-Ponty! Thoreau! Baudelaire! Benjamin!)
We begin in a small room with two men and a problem.
Zeno of Elea, the logician, is presenting one of his famous paradoxes. Motion, he insists, is an illusion. Achilles will never overtake the tortoise; an arrow in flight is always motionless; between any two points lies an infinite number of halfway points, so no journey can ever be completed. The logic is elegant, airtight, and entirely sealed off from the outside world.
Diogenes the Cynic listens. He is not a man for ornamental riddles, nor does he enjoy being pinned beneath another man’s cleverness. He has no interest in tracing the perfect little loops of Zeno’s thought.
When Zeno finishes, the room is quiet.
Diogenes says nothing. He simply stands, walks to the far wall, turns, and walks back. That is the whole of his argument.
This is solvitur ambulando—Latin for “it is solved by walking.”
The beauty of the phrase in this case is that the proof is in the doing. No counterexample. No analytic dismantling. No self-referential looping or self-indulgent navel gazing. What Zeno insists cannot happen has just happened. The body writes its rebuttal across the floor with the most ordinary of movements.
I think of this when I wake up and glance at the pedometer on my phone: 36,383 steps yesterday, and somehow it doesn’t seem enough. I compare it to other times in the last five years: those early months back in New York, reeling from sadness, a new life to build, walking mile after mile because walking felt like the only thing I was willing to do. Or that summer in London, when grief settled over me like clotted cream and I walked from morning to night, shin splints blooming in both legs.
Today, my back hurts. I’d brought too many books in my bag—an amateur mistake!—but I wake clear-headed. No answers, but a strange, decisive clarity. I’d walked myself empty, reminded that more life is always unfolding outside my head than within it.
This is solvitur ambulando.
The Peripatetic
Aristotle made solvitur ambulando into a method, building his entire teaching style on the promenade. His students became known as the Peripatetics (from peripatos, a covered walkway) because philosophy took place in motion.
And of course, he was not alone. This intuition runs through human history. Medieval pilgrims knew that the Camino de Santiago was a way of working out salvation one mile at a time. The Stoics were named for the painted stoa (painted porch) where they walked and taught. Zen Buddhism codified this in kinhin, a walking meditation through a structured form of walking practice. Sufi dervishes carry the same principle into wandering: the path itself as practice. The Jewish people wandered forty years in the desert. For the Christians it’s seen in the Gospel of Luke when two disciples walk, grief-stricken and Christ joins them unrecognized.
It’s in the act of walking—that conversation between steps—that the biggest recognition arrives.
Saint Augustine wrote it down in De Genesi ad Litteram (c. 401 CE): a debate about whether a moving body occupies one place or many as it goes: Ambulando solvitur ista quaestio, he writes—the question is solved by walking. For him we are viatores, beings who think by going, whose understanding sharpens only when it makes contact with the world.
For Søren Kierkegaard, walking was a way of inhabiting what he called existence communication—truth disclosed not as abstract propositions but as something lived, felt, and wrestled with in the flux of the everyday. “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk,” he wrote.
“Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
In Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen, the streets were ever-changing stage for the drama of inwardness and outward observation. The walker was a perfect embodiment of the elusive capital-S Self—never entirely “there” but always arriving. A task renewed with every step.
Writer (and Virginia Woolf’s father) Sir Leslie Stephen, made walking into a secular religion. As an alpinist, essayist, and founder of the Sunday Tramps—a group of intellectuals who met weekly to walk the outskirts of London. He treated walking as both exercise and epistemology. You didn’t speculate about whether a road connected two villages; you went and saw. You didn’t theorize endlessly about a moral dilemma; you took it with you across the field until the movement of your body and the distraction of hedgerows loosened its knots. “Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect, but to turn it out to play for a season,” he wrote.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist who made the body central to philosophy, gave solvitur ambulando muscular meaning. Perception, he wrote, is not passive reception but an active, bodily engagement—“the body is our general medium for having a world.” Walking reactivates that knowing. It shifts a problem from abstraction into encounter.
The scrape of gravel underfoot, the beating heat of unshaded sidewalks, the sudden widening of a view as you reach the waterfront—these are not interruptions to thinking but conditions for it. They dissolve the psychic coagulation that traps us in our heads and return us to what phenomenologists call the lifeworld: the immediate, sensory ground out of which meaning naturally arises.
Clarity often comes mid-stride because the mind loosens when it is no longer the only organ at work. A blocked idea dissolves as the body finds rhythm. Thought becomes porous, more willing to be surprised. The solution does not arrive as an epiphany in your coziest of chairs but as something glimpsed in passing—the litter on the street, the fragment of overheard conversation, the goose in the river.
To walk, then, is to simply make yourself available to meaning.
The Saunterer
In his essay Walking, Henry David Thoreau cast the walked—what he calls a saunterer or a “Holy-Lander”—as a pilgrim in search of some “Holy Land” not marked on any map.
“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ a Saunterer, — a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.
Some, however, would derive [saunterer] from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.”
—Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”
Thoreau defends sauntering as a vocation rather than a pastime, insisting that it requires “a genius for sauntering.” Some are born to it, he suggests, later echoing the Latin phrase Ambulator nascitur, non fit—the walker is born, not made. To Thoreau, true walking was about freedom: an instinctive calling to be “equally at home everywhere,” a way of inhabiting the world with the same inevitability as a river finds the sea.
Solvitur ambulando. Ambulator nascitur, non fit. Solutions, directions, meanings emerge not from abstract speculation but from the embodied process of moving! moving! moving! The saunterer trusts that what looks like detour is in fact discovery, that what feels like wandering is often the most direct route to clarity.
To walk is to accept that knowledge comes on the way. Wisdom is knowing you’ll never be wise. To “be at home everywhere” is to reconcile oneself to the unfinishedness of both the world and the self.
Walking—particularly deeply aimless walking—asks us to enter into experience fully, to let the world impress itself upon us before we rush to conclusions. To walk is to make room for the world to answer back—sometimes in the form of a (very!) welcome solution, sometimes as a reminder that the very question we’re rolling around in our minds is too small.
The Flâneur
Thoreau’s saunterer turns to the woods but the flâneur turns to the city. Born in nineteenth-century Paris and immortalized by Charles Baudelaire, the flâneur is the consummate urban stroller—a figure who moves without destination, attuned to the sensory and social pulse of the streets.
"The crowd is his domain, as the air is that of the bird, as the sea is that of the fish. His passion and his profession are to merge with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite."
— Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne (1863)
Walter Benjamin saw the flâneur as both observer and participant, a detective of fleeting impressions. He practiced a kind of ambulatory reading—of storefront displays, overheard snippets, changing light on stone façades. To walk as a flâneur was to surrender to dérive, to let the city itself dictate the path.
"The flâneur is the observer of the marketplace. His gaze is as much an instrument as it is a mirror, reflecting the city back to itself. To lose oneself in a city — as one loses oneself in a forest — requires a different sort of schooling."
— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
The world pours into you as you pour yourself into it.
For me, it was chunk of Brooklyn—ten miles of reeling thoughts and restless searching—until I ran into one of my oldest and dearest friends just around the corner from where, years ago, we’d first met over a banana split. A step, a view, a chance encounter, a path, a place: what once seemed immovable suddenly bent.
Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking. Not because the answer appears like a riddle cracked, but because the body cracks open, begins to understand what the mind cannot. Each step digests what words can’t—grief, hope, concern, desire, uncertainty—turning them over and over until they take on shape and meaning.
To walk, then, is to court surprise, to discover that understanding isn’t a destination waiting at the end of the block. It’s kinetic—and sneaky! Truth isn’t something you arrive at but rather something rises up to meet you the way the sidewalk always finds the sole of your shoe. And yes, you’re the one doing the moving, but when you’re walking, insight is stepping toward you too.
reminds me of how Nietzsche used to walk hours on hours every day and its from his walks that he came up with his most famous ideas.
"Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement" (Ecce Homo)
I highly recommend "Walkscapes: Walking As An Aesthetic Practice" by Francesco Careri, if you haven't read it yet :)