Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key sto...
courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
It's not supposed to go down easy. Look if it was easy, it wouldn't be much in the way of a philosophical insight. If anyone could do it and do it without much effort, it wouldn't be very impressive. He just said that his formula for human greatness was a more faulty, that one wants nothing to be different.
He said as a prescription, "Not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not nearly bare what is necessary," he said, "still less conceal it. Love it." Greatness is not easily enriched by definition, so loving what happened and ensure it's easy to love what's fun and wonderful, it's hard to accept the inconveniences of life, traffic
and jerks, and air pod drop down a sewer grate, let alone the tragedies. How can you love a prolonged illness, an economic crash, a pandemic, a brutal violent act
“of public humiliation, the loss of a dear friend or a family member?”
The answer is only by difficult work.
It takes practice, it takes reflection, it takes perspective, it takes time. A more faulty is a challenge, that's the whole point. It's something you're supposed to wrestle with, struggle with, asking yourself, "Could that possibly apply here?" It's a formula for greatness because it demands greatness.
It is out of the reach of most of us, out of easy reach, anyway. We have to grow to grab hold of it, and in the end, it's that growth that is probably the only redeeming part, the entire experience. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday, welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoic podcast. I just had a crazy travel day, I got up at four in the morning, I was like 350, drove
to the airport in Panama City, Florida, I caught a 7 a.m flight, had to get there crazy early because of all this TSA stuff, I didn't know how long long long I would be, and I called the airport that day before I just asked, "Hey, is it crazy at that airport?"
“And they said, "All were allowed to tell you that you should get your three hours before”
your flight." Of course, there was precisely two minutes of traffic, I got to the airport at 4, 58, and I was through security at 5 a.m. But anyways, I flew from Panama City, Florida to Atlanta, Atlanta to San Francisco, did a thing in San Francisco, which I'll bring to you shortly, and then I got back to SFO, and
flew home to the exact same thing in reverse. And at those three airports, I probably walked five miles, walked a mile or two of Panama City, walked almost two miles in Atlanta, walked quite a bit as at SFO. It's what I do, actually when I had Michael Easter who wrote the comfort crisis, we talked about exactly this.
This is what he said. So, you work out this morning, tiny bit in the hotel room. In the hotel room? What are you doing in the hotel room? I did, you know, rear foot elevated split squats, I just did a lot of those, and some
planks. Just quick, and then not the airport, I'll just walk around, carrying my bags. I did that too. I feel like I covered a lot of ground inside airports, like I'll walk like a couple miles, just wait, like I'm like, I can sit here and do nothing, yes, or I could get a three mile
walk in over the next 45 minutes. It is one of the greatest travel exercise hacks to just walk around the airport. In the airport, especially if you have a carry on or something, I've gotten like six, seven miles, when I've had a long layover, like I can sit in this lounge or in this uncomfortable chair and just like BS on the internet, or I can just walk, and the walking also, I think,
gives me ideas, right? Sure. Have you seen a lot of interesting things? So yeah, I'm just a hundred percent like I'm an airport walker. Yeah, I think like obviously beautiful walks in nature are great, and if you can walk around
“outside, somewhere wonderful, you should do it.”
But I think walks around parking lots, walks in the airport, walks as you're just killing time, are underrated and also really good, and you're still getting most of the benefits of, like, it's the body being in motion, not the context of where it's in motion that's doing most of the value for you. Right.
If the context was the most important thing running on a treadmill would not work.
Right. So like it all adds up. And it's actually funny, he has a new book out called Walk with Weight, which is about
Rocking.
I haven't read it yet. But I'm sure it's good.
“Certainly I am ideologically aligned with the idea of walking.”
I figure, hey, I'm about to be on an airplane.
For a couple hours, I'm going to be sitting there. I'm not going to be able to move. I should move now. Like it was funny. I was at SFO and I was like, oh, I got lounge access on this flight because of the credit
credit hub. I was like, I could just chill on the lounge. I could eat something. I could work. I was like, you know what?
No. I'm going to walk the next 25 minutes. And that's precisely what I did. Sorry. I just had to pause recording to let my dog in the room, Oreo, hey, Oreo, can you sit
on the rug? Can you sit and be quiet? Just took Oreo for a walk and I love walking. I could have walked a little longer, but we had to put the kids in bed. Anyways, back to what I was saying.
“The only downside about the whole trip, the only thing I'm struggling with is as I walk”
through the airport, I get recognized a lot. And I'm not saying that as a complete or to brag, it's just like a reality of my life that wasn't my reality before I could just be able to be sort of anonymous in the airport. And so I could walk furiously up and down the terminal, I could cover a great distance and just be an anonymous person and the world was one of the benefits of traveling is the sort
of anonymousness of the whole world. And if it was funny, I was on the phone with Samantha my wife the whole time and she was like, you keep getting stopped. She was like, we got to not have this conversation. I can't stand the interruption in the pausing.
And I was like, I get it. I appreciate all the people that stop to say hello that her fans. But I was kind of in the middle of a meditative practice and I wasn't alone. I was talking to someone, but anyways, the point is, I try to walk. I talk about walking and I walk in some beautiful places.
I love where I live in the country, but you can walk anywhere. And I love walking in the airport and you know, I look at my steps on that trip. And I go, yeah, I spent a lot of time traveling. It was a grind. But I also covered some serious distance.
And that's actually where we're going to talk about in today's episode. This is something I put together while I was walking actually down here in Florida on an earlier trip walking down along the beach on the Gulf here. And there's some still a pleasant in it. Let me bring that to you now.
So I told you I was at this Airbnb here and now we on on this trip we took and, um, man, the mattresses were not good. I did not sleep well. The kids did not sleep well. I wish that they had helix mattresses.
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There are a lot of good habits, there's a lot of good practices, there's a lot of things you should be doing.
But the single most important and beneficial thing you can do for your physical, emotional
and spiritual health is to take a walk.
“And not just sometimes, but you should do it daily, you should do it multiple times a day.”
I'm Ryan Holliday, I'm the creator of the dailystoke. And my daily walking practice, which I do, sometimes here at the beach, or I do every day with my dog, I do it when I'm on the phone. I'm walking as much as I can every day because it is a philosophical practice. It's one, the ancient stoics practice.
It's one that parents have practiced for thousands of years. It's one that's helpful to physicists and artists and creators, entrepreneurs and priests and poets alike. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's video. Why you need to get outside and take a walk.
I'm not saying it'll solve all your problems, just most of them. I'm not saying it's the most philosophical thing you can do today. I'm just saying it's something that all the philosophers try to do. Every day, look, what I am saying is it, you should go for a walk.
It'll make everything better, it always does.
Relaxes you, it calms you down, it gets you outside, it gets you moving. It gets the mind moving. It both slows the mind down and gets it moving. Seneca, the stoke philosopher said that we should take wandering walks. He said so the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breath.
So why aren't you doing it? Why are you sitting there? Why are you watching this on the couch or at your desk?
“You need to get moving, you need to get outside.”
There's a famous exchange with the philosopher Kirkegaard. He's writing a letter to his sister-in-law who's depressed. He's having a hard time. He says above all else, you must not lose the desire to walk. Now, you could set your watch in 19th century Copenhagen to Kirkegaard's walking habit.
He would write in the mornings, and in the afternoon he would walk. He would walk on the sidewalks, which had just been recently invented. He would walk out, pass town, he'd walk out to the cemetery where he's now buried. He says, "Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being." He says, "I walk away from every illness."
He says, "I know no thoughts so burdensome that you cannot walk away from it." Basically, he believed that movement was sacred, it was cleansing, it was clarifying. He understood that to someone who was struggling, there was something extra important about getting outside, getting, moving, getting out of your own head. There's another famous Kirkegaard story where he's driven out of his house one morning.
He's frustrated, he's high-strong, he's upset, the writing isn't going well. He walks for hours, hours and hours, and he's finally at peace, he's turning around, he gets back home, and writing front of his house, he bumps into some person he knows in town, and they unload all his problems on him. He was a little frustrated, but he says, "Actually, it wasn't a big deal."
He says, "There was only one thing left for me to do." He said, "Instead of going home, I had to go walking again."
And that's an essential idea.
“If you want to be healthy, if you want to be happy, you should always be walking.”
The single best thing you can do for your mental health is the thing that I'm doing right now. You should take a walk. There's actually an old Latin expression, it is solved by walking. Nietzsche actually said that it was only ideas had by walking that have any worth. And then the Zen Buddhist have an idea of walking meditation.
I've never gone for a walk and then gotten back to my house and not felt better about myself about the world, about whatever I was so upset and stressed about. But the idea is you get moving, you get the repetitive motion going, you get outside, and it calms you down. The best thing you can do in crazy times like this is to go for a walk.
The poet William Wordsworth walks something like 180,000 miles in his lifetime. It's like six and a half miles a day from age five when he picked up the habit. He would walk every day near a pond near his house and it was part of his poetry practice. As it is for countless artists and physicists and philosophers, it was on these walks that the lines from his poems would come to him.
And he'd opt and be hours and hours from home so he'd have to repeat them over and over again in his head. And in doing that, that's where he would refine and hone the language until it was perfect. And actually it's something that his biographers have wondered about ever since. Was it the scenery that was spurring the ideas or was it the movement that was jogging the thoughts?
I think any ordinary person who has a walking process knows that the answer is both. It's obviously both. This is why the Buddhists spoke of walking meditation. It both clears and empties the mind and allows things to pop into it. And in our own search for beauty and wonder in life, I think we would be well served by developing this walking practice.
If we want to access those deeper parts of our consciousness, we need to get ...
Like on a good walk, your mind isn't blank.
It can't be otherwise you'll trip over something, but you're also being forced to observe and consider and evaluate the things around you. And in fact, the studies confirm this that walkers tend to perform better in what's called creative, divergent thinking.
“Some studies have even found that it's a treatment for major depression, right?”
That's the key to a good walk. It's awareness to be present and open to the experience. You put your phone away, you put pressing business on pause, you let your stress melt away. You look down at your feet, you wonder what they're doing. You notice how effortlessly you're moving, is it you that's doing that or is it happening on its own?
You breathe in, you breathe out, you consider who paved this trail, you consider who walked this trail before you. You consider where those people are now, what happened to them? And when you start to feel those tug of responsibility of those interruptions, you push them away. Like you do, the thoughts during a meditation, you get lost, you are unreachable, you go slowly. And the wonderful thing about walking is that it's available to all of us all the times.
How did he stay sane? I mean, there must have been so much pressure, so much work. There was so much bad news, so much stress, so much death, so much struggle, so much responsibility. Marcus Aurelius didn't have an easy goal of it. Being the emperor would have been extraordinarily difficult. There was floods and famines and wars and the trails,
plagues and difficult people. He had children, he had health issues. So where does he find relief? Where does he find goodness and beauty? How does he replenish himself? In himself to be sure in philosophy, yes, but where else? It's clear from meditations that Marcus Aurelius, in addition to his interior explorations, was a walker. He walked around Rome, he walked around Greece, he walked around the countryside.
We see his poetic observations about wheat bending low under its own weight. We see that he watched animals as they moved through the hills. He was fascinated by the olive grows on his estate, if the multiple metaphors that it uses are any indication. He loved hot springs and rivers and waves and rocky shores. Nature nurtured him as it nurtures us. It provided him perspective and peace.
It humbled him. It inspired him. It calmed him down. It replenished him.
You know, the world is crazy, but it's also always been crazy.
And there's always also been calm and beauty and comfort in nature.
“That's what the outside world provides us.”
If you're feeling anxious or stressed or overworked, go for a walk as we said. Get outside, get in an nature, go for a hike, lose yourself in a forest. Look out over a hill and see how small things are down below. Get lost. It's the best way for you to get out of your head to get away from it all. By getting outside, you get outside yourself, you get outside your head.
Literally, go touch grass. Let nature do its work on you. There's a reason that poets and priests and philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs ordinary people alike take walks. There's something magical about getting outside and getting moving. Go slowly, go fast. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that it burns calories, although that's great too. What matters is that it gets you outside,
gets you moving. It gets you in a meditative state of mind. It both clears the mind and opens it up for things to pop into your head. Some of my best ideas as a writer have popped into my head. Things that I've needed to figure out in my marriage. Things I've been struggling with as a parent,
“as a human being. I always feel better after I take a walk, which is why it's what you should”
be doing, not just occasionally, but every day. Sometimes, multiple times a day. It is the single best foundational habit you can practice in your life. Darwin's daily writing routine involves several walks, Daniel Kahneman, the groundbreaking behavioral psychologist. He said that he did some of his best thinking on leisurely walks with his friend and collaborator, Amos Tursky.
When Martin Luther King was a seminary student, he would walk multiple times a day. That just means walkers. They were on the move as we should all be as well.
And look, finally, I would just say this. It doesn't matter where you do it. It certainly doesn't
hurt to go for walk catch a beautiful sunset on a beach or walk through an old growth forest, but some of the best walks of my life have been in airport terminals and around parking lots. The important thing was that I got outside and I got moving. It was what I brought to it, not where it brought me. It was about the state of mind. It brought me to not what state I was in.
Sure, location helps and prettier is always better than ugly.
loud, but the walking is what's magic, not where you're walking. So just get out there and get after it and let this thing change your life this year.
