The Latin phrase “Solvitur Ambulando” means “It is solved by walking,” and is attributed to Diogenes.
Walking? “What problems have ever been solved by walking?” you may ask. Walking is decidedly low-tech and not particularly glamorous. Nothing could be more simple for those of us lucky enough to be ambulatory. Walking is so boring that the word for a person who travels on foot — “pedestrian” — is synonymous for “dull” and “ordinary.” Yikes.
But those of us who walk know that to walk is to make external the inner journey. Here’s what Thoreau, an ardent walker/writer, writes in “Walking” (1862):
“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 a la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land, till the children- exclaimed, ‘There goes a SainteTerrer,’ 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….For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.”
Okay, the Crusade metaphor is a little warlike and christian-focused for my tastes, but. Walking does buoy the spirit. And when I have a writing problem, I can concur: Solvitur Ambulando.