Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: 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.
— Søren Kierkegaard
This line comes from a letter Kierkegaard wrote in 1847 to his niece Henriette Lund — Jette, as the family called her. Walking wasn’t a metaphor for him; it was how he actually worked. He composed much of his philosophy on foot through the streets of Copenhagen, and this letter is him passing that habit on as advice, not as a slogan. More on the letter.
I love to walk. It sounds like a cliché to say the Camino changed my life, but it did — because it’s where I first understood the actual power of a walk, not the metaphor of one. Health is a Spiritual Problem Walking 1000km to Santiago wasn’t a fitness challenge, it was proof that showing up daily, one step at a time, could reshape how I think and who I am. That’s the Journeying Mindset I keep coming back to — the wandering, the getting lost, the sense that the walk itself was doing something to me that sitting still never could. I still measure a lot of my thinking by whether I’ve had a long walk that day, which traces back to When was your first long walk — the question that first made me notice how much clarity a simple walk gives me.