Go for a walk.

I am sometimes asked which of the Lichtenbergian Precepts are the most difficult for people to grok, and I usually answer that RITUAL is, because as a society we have lost some of the familiarity with the pattern, but there’s a case to be made that TASK AVOIDANCE confuses people just as much.

“How can you get anything done if you’re always putting it off?” is the general query, and the answer to that is very short: Structured procrastination is what make Lichtenbergianism work. Avoid working on Project A by working on Project B, and vice versa.

There’s another aspect of TASK AVOIDANCE that people sometimes overlook, and that is the role of GESTATION in the creative process. Sometimes a project just needs time to breathe without being poked at.

I was reminded of this the other day when Jono Hey’s wonderful Sketchplanations email arrived and there was a link to another concept, one that I had not heard before: solvitur ambulando.

There’s still enough Latin embedded somewhere in my brain that I figured that it meant something like “solving by walking,” and I was almost exactly correct: It means “it is solved by walking.” Instead of banging your head against the intractable piece of crap that you yourself brought into this version of the universe, go for a walk.

Allow me to point out that the phrase originated with Diogenes way back in ancient Athens, so getting up and going for a walk in order to let your brain do its thing while you do another is not some new-fangled hippie-woo BE-ONE-WITH-NATURE shibboleth. Smart people have been going for walks to clear their heads for literal millenia.

Back in The Day, i.e., before electronic entertainment, going for a walk was part of everyone’s day. The Italians made it a thing, the passeggiata, the evening stroll. Beethoven went for two or three long walks every day, and most of that time he was making new music in his head (and writing it down in his WASTE BOOK).

Nowadays, it’s not as easy to just get up and go outside and walk for an hour or so. We have clocks and deadlines and all those people we need to argue with on the internet, don’t we? What good would a walk around the block do, really?

This takes us back to RITUAL. Getting up and going out constitutes an INVOCATION, doesn’t it? While you’re walking, your brain will start making connections/metaphors (NUMEN/CONNECTIONS) — see how that bird flicked that seed, what if…? You may have a dialogue with yourself, interviewing your brain about what the problem is. You may answer yourself.

If nothing else, you’ll probably clear your head. You might not have solved the problem — in fact, you may have come up with two more projects that you want to start — but your body and brain have had a break. Take a deep breath (BREAKING THE CIRCLE/BENEDICTION) and get back to work.