Walk to Think
Walk to think
Walk to expand
Walk to imagine
Walk to ideate
Walk to make it possible
Walk to dream
Walk to breathe
Walk to free
Walk to travel
Walk to experience
Walk to map
Walk to touch
Walk to see
Walk to listen
Walk to smell
Walk to taste
Walk to explore
Walk to discover
Walk to embrace
Walk to rethink
Walk to pause
Walk to play
Walk to inspect
Walk to move
Walk to progress
Walk to stimulate
Walk to connect
Walk to learn
Walk to pace
Walk to structure
Walk to restructure
Walk to destroy
Walk to create
Walk to meet
Walk to be alone
Walk to be with people
Walk to socialise
Walk to settle
Walk to unsettle
Walk to exercise
Walk to question
Walk to be
The walk has been a common literary metaphor, notably used by Antonio Machado in “Caminante, no hay camino” to talk about constructing the future through walking. Also, it has been used as a recurrent mechanism of intellectual inspiration among academics, notably by Charles Darwin or Oliver Sachs.
In October-November 2022 I’ve been granted a two-month sabbatical, which has been my first sabbatical, to focus on grant writing and other research activities including a visit to Helsinki at the “Symposium Technoscientific Practices of Music; New Technologies, Instruments and Agents” and a research performance at “Peforming Critical AI I: feedback, noise, corpus, code” in Cafe OTO. I have decided to mostly work from home in Sheffield to optimise my concentration. Something that I’ve tried to incorporate in this isolated period has been to take a daily walk. The daily walk has been typically after lunchtime or before/after tea time because the darkness is approaching increasingly earlier towards the end of the year. Sometimes, I’ve also taken a walk in the mornings or before lunch, depending on the other activities.
During one of these walks, it occurred to me that I should mention the relevance of taking a walk when having this special time for thinking and writing, which can be also applied to writing a book or other isolated individual tasks that require concentration and high intellectual output. The above text has been produced during one of my daily walks using an audio recorder app on my phone. Moving forward, something I would like to keep once I return to my normal duties is my daily walk.
Acknowledgments
My sincere thank you to all my colleagues at DMU who have supported my sabbatical, with special thanks to the MTI2 family (Leigh Landy, James Andean, Peter Batchelor, Simon Atkinson, Bret Battey, John Young, Petros Galanakis) and the DMU Research Services, especially Tom Moore, Finella Bottomley, and Gaia Rossetti for their daily support. Also thank you to the programmes ‘Living in Digital Society’ led by Prof Gabriel Egan, and the Future Research Leaders programme led by Prof Mike Baynham and Prof Deborah Cartmell for their mentoring roles and trust. Finally, thanks to the Research Innovation and Scholarship Award (RISA), with special thanks to the Director of Research Services Dr Meera Warrier, the Interim Deputy Dean for the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Media (CEM) Dr James Russell, the Interim Head of the Leicester Media School (LMS) Dr Allan Taylor, the Dean for the Faculty of CEM Prof Shushma Patel and the Associate Dean (Research & Innovation) in CEM Prof Raffaella Villa for their support.