Before you set off on a walk, however serpentine you imagine it becoming, a mind’s-eye thread winds off before you into the distance. You see hazy, fragmented images of the route and the end point.

That end point might be back home, or back at the office: a circular walk. It might be a tea room or a pub: a ramble in the countryside. Its point might be a peak. 

In the early moments of the walk, those images of the route and destination kind of control the experience. They accompany you step by step.

But the longer you walk, the experience becomes less about those images, which are ousted by the bitty, fleeting sensations that come along: glimpses, pangs, scents, noises.

Many of those sensations are impossible to verbalise, and you can’t anticipate them, which is why the route and the end point dominate your mental image of the walk. But as you start to feel them in all their hard-to-pin-down-ness, their value is self-evident. The walk is so much more than the destination and the route.

And here is where the synergy between walking and mindful thinking takes a very beautiful turn.

If you sit at your desk and try to devise a solution, it can be hair-tearingly difficult. You’ll have some half-formed ideas that present themselves to you over and over again, blocking out the arrival of new, more helpful ideas.

As Edward de Bono famously said, “You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.”

Going for a walk – make it at least an hour, if you’re able to – dissolves stubborn mental constructs, just as it does away with the misconception that a walk is a route and a destination.

Just as you stop thinking about the destination so much, you also stop flicking through other stale old ideas. You step away from de Bono’s hole.

There’s a wonderful book called In Praise of Walking, in which the author Shane O’Mara breaks down the science of all this. He details how walking facilitates problem-solving by allowing the mind to wander, connecting ideas, and reducing stress.

Another beautiful thing is how grounding it is to walk. Ironically, it brings you home, so that you know yourself and your innate goodness more intimately and intuitively. You also know that this walk and the thinking accompanying it – including any problems ‘solved’ or decisions made – are good. Simply good. Desks don’t have that power.

And because you have faith in this thinking’s goodness, you might even decide that you simply don’t know the answer to the problem you were hoping to solve – and that’s perfectly okay. You become okay with not knowing, with ambivalence: the answer is simply not within you this time. You know you’ve looked as well as you could.

‘I’m torn – I just don’t know’ becomes more acceptable. It becomes assertive, productive, an owned, embodied decision to stop time-wasting, accept where you are, and recognise that this is what we have teams for, what the relationships you’ve cultivated with others are for. You seek counsel with gladness, gratitude and confidence.

Nature shows us that no one being is in control. Only the whole is omniscient.

And all that while getting your steps up!