Rewired By Wisdom
Why do your best ideas come when you walk? Nietzsche’s famous line began as an argument. The novelist Gustave Flaubert had said one can only think and write sitting down, and Nietzsche shot back that the sedentary life is “the very sin against the Holy Spirit.”
Another detail from the Stanford tests: students who sat through both rounds came up with fewer ideas the second time, as if the well ran dry. Students who walked twice kept the same pace.
Even the name of Aristotle’s school has two origin stories. One says it came from his walks with students. Another, recorded by the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius, says he walked and talked with Alexander, the young prince who became Alexander the Great, after the prince’s illness.
When your ideas run dry, do you sit harder or stand up? Tell us where your best ideas find you.
(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols; Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book 5)
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