Walk, Walk, and Walk

I had a very peaceful Thanksgiving this year. The kind where the air feels softer, where conversation flows without effort, where gratitude isn't something you perform but something you breathe. That morning, I went for a very long walk. The kind I've been taking for years now—2, sometimes 3 hours of steady motion, music in my ears, the world passing by as I move through it.

During that walk, something shifted. I started thinking about where this practice came from, the genesis of walking in my life. My mind went immediately to 2019, my freshman year at FSU. Fall semester, only a few months in, and I was drowning. Panic attacks that came like waves I couldn't predict. Anxieties that wrapped around my chest and wouldn't let go. I remember calling my aunt, trying to explain what I couldn't fully articulate, and her suggestion: "Walk. Put on some upbeat music and just walk."

I thought that was the beginning. The origin story. My aunt's wisdom saving me from myself.

But then, mid-stride on this Thanksgiving morning, another memory surfaced. Earlier. Much earlier. Middle school. Weekend mornings around 6:30 AM, the neighborhood still quiet, the sky just beginning to lighten. I would ask my parents for permission—because that's what you did at that age—and then I'd slip out the door, alone, and walk. Not because I was anxious. Not because anyone told me to. Just because something in me needed to move, needed to be outside, needed the rhythm of my own feet against pavement and the stillness of early morning and the space that walking created.

That's where it started. Not with crisis, but with instinct. My body knew something before my mind had any framework for it. And when my aunt offered her suggestion years later, she wasn't teaching me something new; she was reminding me of an embodied wisdom I'd already possessed, one I'd somehow forgotten in the transition from adolescence to young adulthood, from the spaciousness of weekend mornings to the compression of college life.

This realization—that walking was always mine, that my body had been regulating itself long before I knew what regulation meant—led me down a path of inquiry that I needed to research more deeply. Because what I was doing on those walks, what I've been doing for years now, isn't just exercise. It isn't just "clearing my head." It's something more fundamental, more essential. It's how I process emotions I can't yet articulate but desperately need to ventilate to remain calm and grounded. It's pre-verbal intelligence. It's the body solving problems the mind hasn't figured out how to name.

The Body as Primary Knower

Western thought has spent centuries trying to convince us that thinking happens exclusively in the head. Descartes gave us "I think, therefore I am"—cogito, ergo sum—and with it, the devastating implication that existence is validated through cerebral activity, through rationality, through what can be articulated and argued and proven in language. The body, in this framework, is secondary. A vessel. A machine that carries the brain around.

But anyone who has ever walked to calm anxiety, danced to release grief, or felt their chest tighten with an emotion they don't yet have words for knows this is bullshit.

The body thinks. It knows things the mind hasn't caught up to yet. It processes information in registers that precede language—through sensation, through rhythm, through the intelligence of muscles and breath and movement. When you're in the throes of panic, telling you to "just think positive" or "rationalize it away" is not only unhelpful, it's insulting to the body's experience. The panic isn't happening in the prefrontal cortex where logic lives; it's happening in the autonomic nervous system, in the rapid firing of the amygdala, in the constriction of the chest and the shallow breathing and the racing heart.

Walking addresses the problem where it actually lives: in the body.

For those who regulate through motion—and not everyone does—walking is a form of thinking. Not thinking about something, but thinking through it. The Greeks understood this. The Peripatetic school of philosophy, founded by Aristotle, was named for the covered walkway (peripatos) where he and his students would walk while discussing ideas. Kierkegaard wrote, "I have walked myself into my best thoughts." Nietzsche claimed, "All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking."

This isn't metaphor. It's recognition of a fundamental truth: forward motion through space creates conditions for cognitive and emotional movement. The bilateral rhythm of walking—left, right, left, right—activates both hemispheres of the brain, creating integration where there was fragmentation. It's why walking feels different from sitting still with your thoughts; the body is literally helping the mind process by providing rhythm, by discharging excess energy, by creating a container through motion.

What's Actually Happening When You Walk

The bilateral rhythm—that alternating left-right pattern—creates what therapists call cross-hemispheric activation. It's similar to EMDR therapy, which uses eye movements or tapping to help people process trauma and anxiety. Your brain is literally integrating fragmented emotional experiences, filing away distressing material that might otherwise stay stuck on loop.

Then there's the vagus nerve. This massive nerve runs from your brainstem down through your chest and abdomen, controlling heart rate, breathing, digestion, basically everything your body does when it's trying to stay alive. Sustained, rhythmic walking activates it, and when it gets activated, it sends a signal to your entire system: You're safe. You can rest. You can digest. That grounded feeling after a long walk? That's not metaphorical. That's your nervous system literally re-establishing the mind-body connection.

Your brain chemistry shifts too. Endorphins flood in (natural pain relief), endocannabinoids create that runner's high, BDNF supports your brain's ability to form new patterns and break old ones. Serotonin and dopamine levels adjust. This is why movement works as well as medication for many people dealing with anxiety and depression; it's biochemistry, not willpower.

And the music? That upbeat soundtrack isn't distraction. Your nervous system is locking onto that external beat, using it as scaffolding to rebuild coherence when your internal rhythm is chaos. Your heart rate variability starts to align with the tempo. Your brainwaves shift. It's called entrainment: your body finding a steadier rhythm outside itself and using it to reorganize what's disorganized within.

The 2-3 hours matter because that's what your nervous system actually needs to complete its stress cycle. We live in a culture that treats emotions like tasks: feel it, process it, move on, all in 20 minutes. But bodies don't work on that timeline. Sometimes you need hours to metabolize what's been building for days or weeks.

Pre-Verbal Processing and the Limits of Language

There's a particular phrase that captures the essence of this practice: emotions I can't yet articulate but need to ventilate. This is critical. The walk isn't about figuring things out or arriving at conclusions. It's not problem-solving in the traditional sense. It's ventilation: the release of pressure, the discharge of energy that has nowhere else to go.

So much of contemporary wellness culture is fixated on articulation. Journaling prompts that demand you name your feelings. Therapy models that require you to talk it out. Self-help books that promise clarity through analysis. All of this assumes that emotional experience is best understood through language, that the goal is always to translate sensation into words, to make the implicit explicit.

But what if some experiences resist translation? What if the demand to articulate prematurely actually interrupts the body's natural processing? What if, sometimes, the body needs to solve things on its own terms, in its own language of sensation and movement and breath?

Walking honors this. It creates space for pre-verbal processing; the kind of knowing that exists before words, the kind of intelligence that lives in the felt sense of the body. Anxiety often arrives as bodily sensation first: tight chest, racing heart, shallow breathing, a vague sense of dread that has no clear object. These are messages from the body, information encoded in a somatic register. Walking allows you to engage with the sensation itself rather than forcing premature translation into narrative.

The answer doesn't arrive as a thought—Oh, now I understand why I was anxious—but as a shift: lighter chest, steadier breath, quieter mind. The body resolves what the mind was stuck on. And later, sometimes hours or days later, language might arrive. The articulation comes after the processing, not before. The body knows first; the mind catches up when it's ready.

Movement as Methodology

In the framework of "raw intellectualism:" the refusal of false binaries between body and spirit, between sacred and profane, between feeling and thinking—walking becomes more than a coping mechanism. It becomes a methodology. A way of approaching life's questions not through analysis alone but through embodied inquiry.

This is where the practice of walking intersects with deeper questions about presence, about gratitude, about what it means to be fully alive in a body. Thanksgiving, in its traditional framing, is a cerebral exercise: sit down, reflect on your blessings, list them out, express them verbally. There's an assumption that gratitude happens in the mind, that presence is achieved through stillness.

But what if presence isn't static? What if, for some people, being present requires motion? What if the body needs to move to arrive at stillness, needs to walk to finally be here?

This is the paradox at the heart of the practice: walking to arrive. Moving to be still.

Covering miles of physical ground to find internal ground. It defies the logic of Cartesian dualism, where the body is just the vehicle and the mind is the driver. Instead, it reveals what Indigenous wisdom traditions, Eastern philosophies, and somatic practices have always known: the body and mind are not separate. They are one integrated system, and sometimes the body has to lead.

The gratitude that emerges from these walks isn't a list of blessings. It's something more fundamental: gratitude for legs that carry, for lungs that breathe, for a nervous system that knows how to regulate itself when given the time and space. Gratitude for the rhythm that holds when thoughts spiral. Gratitude for the body's capacity to process what language cannot yet reach.

What the Walks Have Taught Me

Over the years, through hundreds of miles and countless hours of motion, certain lessons have crystallized; not as intellectual conclusions but as embodied truths.

The body knows before language knows. There's an intelligence that operates beneath the level of conscious thought, in the autonomic responses and somatic sensations that guide behavior long before rationality gets involved. That middle school self who woke early on weekend mornings to walk wasn't doing so because of a conscious understanding of nervous system regulation. The body just knew. It needed space, needed movement, needed the quiet rhythm of feet on pavement and the expansion of early morning air.

Not all problems need solutions; some need ventilation. The Western mind loves solutions. It wants to fix, to resolve, to arrive at answers. But sometimes the problem isn't a puzzle to be solved; it's pressure to be released. Energy that needs to move through and out. The walk doesn't solve the anxiety; it ventilates it. It gives the nervous system a way to complete its cycle, to discharge what it's been holding.

Trust in what cannot yet be articulated. There's a profound humility in honoring pre-verbal knowledge. In refusing to force feelings into words before they're ready. In allowing the body to work in its own time, in its own language. This runs counter to a culture that demands constant articulation, that treats silence or uncertainty as weakness. But sometimes the most intelligent response to internal experience is to let it unfold without forcing it into narrative. To trust that understanding will come when it comes, and that in the meantime, the body is doing its work.

Presence is a practice, not a state. It's easy to romanticize presence as some permanent condition of enlightened awareness, achieved once and maintained forever. But presence, like gratitude, is something that must be practiced again and again. For some, it's practiced through meditation or prayer. For others, through art or music or time in nature. For kinesthetic processors, it's practiced through movement. Through the commitment to show up, to walk, to let the body lead even when the mind doesn't understand why.

Abracadabra and the Magic of Embodied Being

There's an ancient Aramaic phrase, avra kehdabra, often translated as "I create as I speak." Over time it became abracadabra, the magician's incantation, suggesting that words have the power to bring things into being. Language as creation. Speech as magic.

Descartes gave us cogito, ergo sum — I think, therefore I am. Consciousness validated through thought. Existence proven through the act of thinking about existence.

I'm not here to dismiss these ideas. They're true. Words do create. Thought does validate existence. Language is powerful, and the ability to articulate, to analyze, to think rationally is one of humanity's greatest gifts. The issue isn't that these approaches are wrong; it's that we've been taught they're the only approaches. That if you can't think your way through it or speak it into being, you're somehow failing at being human.

But what about I move, therefore I am? What about the magic that happens not through words but through embodied action?

Here's what I've learned: these aren't competing philosophies. They're complementary ones. Sometimes the situation requires thought first—careful analysis, rational planning, the kind of cerebral work that Descartes championed. Sometimes it requires words — speaking things into existence, naming what needs to be named, the creative power of language that abracadabra promises.

And sometimes, the situation requires the body to move first. To walk off the panic before you can think clearly about what caused it. To discharge the energy before you have the capacity to articulate what you're feeling. To let the rhythm regulate you before language can even touch what's happening inside.

This is what I mean by "raw intellectualism," refusing the false binary that says it has to be mind or body, thought or movement, language or sensation. The most sophisticated approach recognizes that different moments call for different methodologies, and often the most effective processing involves both: walking first to ventilate, to create space, to let the body do its regulatory work, and then — hours later, days later, when the nervous system has settled — sitting down to write, to think, to articulate what the body has already begun to resolve.

The walking is the preparation. The pre-verbal groundwork that makes verbal processing possible. You can't always think your way out of a panic attack, but you can often walk your way through it, and then, once you're grounded again, that's when thought and language become useful tools rather than overwhelming demands.

Coming Home

That Thanksgiving morning walk brought me back to something essential. Not just to the memory of those middle school mornings or my aunt's advice or even the countless walks I've taken since. It brought me back to the fundamental recognition that my body has always known how to take care of me, even when my mind was lost.

And maybe that's the deepest form of gratitude: not the performative listing of blessings but the quiet acknowledgment of the body's wisdom. The legs that have carried me through panic and grief and overwhelm and joy. The rhythm that returns when everything else feels uncertain. The space that opens up when I give myself permission to move.

Thanksgiving asks us to be present, to reflect, to give thanks. For those of us who process through motion, presence doesn't look like sitting still. It looks like walking until the body settles, until the breath deepens, until the mind finally quiets enough to hear what the body has been saying all along.

I think, therefore I am? Yes. I create as I speak? Absolutely. But also: I walk, therefore I become. I move, therefore I return. I trust the body to lead when the mind cannot, and I trust the mind to make sense of what the body has processed.

This Thanksgiving, I'm grateful for every step—the ones I took at 6:30 AM as a middle schooler, the ones I took during my freshman year panic, the ones I took this morning, and all the ones still to come. I'm grateful for a body that knows how to regulate itself, and for a mind that's learning to trust that process. I'm grateful for the walks that prepare me for the writing, for the movement that makes thought possible, for the rhythm that holds me until language can finally catch up.

The body knows. It has always known.

All we have to do is walk—and then, when we're ready, to think and speak and write about what the walking has revealed.

As always, stay tricky, be open-minded, and get curious

                                                                                         Until next time,

                                                                                                      Tricky Sol