Walking, and the argument against arrival.

Thoreau walked for some four hours of every day, often in a direction he had not chosen in advance, and he counted those hours among the most important he kept. To a calendar, this is indefensible — four hours, daily, unbilled. To a mind, it may be the most defensible part of the day, and certainly the hardest to protect.

We have made arrival the whole point of motion. A walk is now a commute or it is exercise; either way it is measured, and what gets measured is the getting-there. The walk that arrives nowhere in particular has quietly lost its standing. It looks, to the modern eye, like a walk with a bug in it.

The use of the uncounted hour

But the aimless walk was never aimless. Its aim was simply not a destination. Thoreau’s word for the faculty it served was sauntering, which he traced — half-seriously, in the manner of a man enjoying his own etymology — to pilgrims bound for the sainte terre, the holy land, and therefore at home everywhere and nowhere ¹ 1The etymology is almost certainly invented, and Thoreau half-admits it. It is the better story regardless — which is its own small argument for keeping it. . The point of the saunter is that the walking is the holy land. There is nowhere else you are trying to get to.

Thinking has the same shape. The good idea almost never arrives by the route you planned for it; it turns up on a side path, while you were ostensibly on your way somewhere else. An hour of directed effort produces directed results. An hour of sauntering produces the thing you did not know to aim at — which is, more often than not, the thing worth having.

A defence, for the hurried

I am not against arrival. Arrival pays for the walking; I keep deadlines like anyone. But a life that is only arrivals is a life with no holy land in it — no stretch of the day that exists for its own sake and answers to no one.

This is a defence of that stretch: the uncounted hour, the road with no errand at the end of it. It is written, with full awareness of the irony, for people in a hurry.