What the Year of Walking Taught Me
The year of walking is over and the tally is this: a hundred and forty walks, most of them the same valley, a good third of them in weather I would not have called weather at all.
The first thing it taught me was that most of my thinking happens at four miles an hour and not at a desk. I used to sit down to write something difficult and produce a first paragraph in an hour. Now I walk, and the paragraph arrives somewhere past the allotments, fully formed and slightly impatient, and I write it down when I get back and it takes eleven minutes. I do not entirely understand this. I know only that the difficulty is not solved but moved, and the moving is the point.
The second thing it taught me was about chess, which is where I did not expect to find a lesson. A position on a board and a position in a valley turn out to require the same thing: the willingness to sit with something unpromising without reaching for the move that merely looks decisive. A whole afternoon on a hill teaches you what a bad rook ending feels like from the inside, which is that it is not interesting and it is also the only thing there is. My games are not better, but I am slower to resign, and I have noticed that being slow to resign has cost me nothing.
Third, it changed how I read. I went back to books I had not opened since I was twenty, and the ones I finished I found that I had spent thirty years agreeing with a book I did not understand. Reading has become less like finding out and more like measuring, which is duller to say and much better to do.
The hill is still there. I am still going up it, in the same order, at the same speed, with the same two questions. Next year I will have more of them, and I expect the answers to be smaller and better. If you want the short version of the whole thing: walk, and the rest of it follows. That is all I have, and it has been enough.