V. Woolf (no I’m still not done with MOMENTS OF BEING) “made up” her book TO THE LIGHTHOUSE during a stroll around her London home at 52 Tavistock Square “in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another.”
I walk outdoors every single day, rain or shine. My go-to is a neighborhood park 7 minutes away, my second option is a series of three strip malls at a popular intersection near my favorite coffee shop and my third, the hilly sidewalks bordering my parents’ home. My walks range between 30 minutes to 4 hours and there is no real sense of just how long I’ll be walking at the start. Frankly, it depends on how eager I am to get back to writing.
I have found that electronic means of productivity—digital planners, apps, calendars, lists, what-have-yous—do very, very little for me in comparison with this good ‘ol get-the-fuck-away-from-the-screens-and-go-for-a-walk routine. But I hesitate to call this productivity at all; I hate that word, how demanding it is, how it tries to measure you for what you give and not what you are/what your mind can do when there’s no agenda at all.
Walking requires patience, and patience has been such a kind driver for my brain and what it decides to help my fingertips do on any given day. Walking wants you to live here, in the moment, in your head, away from what we think is life (people, digital connection, people, work, people, emails, deadlines, people) and toward what life was before us all—air and space and trees and sky and nothing but. “Shaking off that village” as Mr. Thoreau loved to say with the forest around him.
In solitude and without headphones, walking is the ultimate cure (I don’t like the word cure here) for writer’s block (I hate the phrase writer’s block). How do I explain…
“Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked.”
—Virginia Woolf, MOMENTS OF BEING
That right there, the imagination that bursts from nothing but sounds, leaf-crunches and tires-on-gravel and wind-against-store-windows and, my personal favorite, the up-the-tree-squirrel-rustles.
Take, for example, this one weird thing born during a recent walk:
There is a woman I will write about whose name begins with J; she will be married to a man and she will be ill and he will get up in the morning and bring her breakfast in bed at 7 a.m. and he will leave the house for work as she remains a decaying corpse under the covers and there are only two moments when their eyes will meet throughout this day: 1) he will be fixing his tie in the mirror as she picks up the glass of orange juice from the silver Bivona platter engraved with their late retriever’s name (there are no children) and she will look up before the first sip and notice he has been watching her from the mirror and she will let the glass linger, her eyes linger, before she lifts the cup to her lips and allows her lids to fall 2) ever fleeting, as he backs out of the driveway, she will falter toward the bedside window and notice his eyes from the rearview mirror, like a pair of constellations far away, from another universe; but the evidence is conclusive: they are certainly his and J has forgotten his name.
Don’t ask, I don’t know, does she have amnesia? Is she dead? A ghost? Depressed? A captive? I don’t know. But I haven’t stopped thinking about J for days, and now I have a character who I imagine wears white cotton maternity tunics and grey-black Gilligan & O’Malley bottoms to bed. She has hair the color of this specific photo of The Dust Bowl and her nail-biting habits are reserved, for some strange reason, for the pinky only. Every day, every walk, I learn something new about her, this mystery J. What will I do with her? I don’t know, I don’t know.
Now I’m laying here, and I’m reading about The Dust Bowl at 3 a.m. on a Friday night. I’m reading about 1930s Plains, and I’m convinced there’s a windy, dusty, barren setting in the backdrop of J’s life and hell, maybe I want to switch the roles; the husband is ill and she is off to work, buttoning her pinstripe suit in the mirror, fading in his memory as she backs out of the garage.
I can’t wait to wake up and write and walk a little longer in the morning.
—fiza