The walk that fixed the paragraph
Forty minutes rewriting one sentence, then four thousand steps, and the sentence wrote itself.
1 min read
On a Tuesday in March I spent forty minutes on one paragraph, produced six versions, disliked all of them, and then walked to the top of Troopers Hill and back, which is about four thousand steps. The paragraph was finished before I got home, in my head, in one piece.
This happens often enough that I have stopped treating it as luck, and it raises an awkward question about what the forty minutes at the desk were for.
The desk is where you load the problem
My best guess, and it is a guess, is that the forty minutes were not wasted work but necessary loading. You cannot solve a problem on a walk that you have not first held closely enough to carry.
Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust makes the case at book length and is careful not to over-claim the mechanism. What I notice practically is that the walk has to be a familiar route. A new route uses the same attention the paragraph needs; Troopers Hill and back requires nothing of me at all.
(I have tried and failed to shortcut this by walking first, which produces forty minutes of pleasant walking and no paragraph.)
So the sequence is not walk instead of work. It is work until it is genuinely stuck, then leave, and let four thousand steps do what the sixth version at the desk was never going to.
