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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, for our final conversation today, we want to know what walking means to you, walking alone or walking with other people. Do you prefer the solitary amble to clear your head, maybe explore a new place, or would you rather take a stroll with a good friend for a spirited catching-up session?

Well, don't ask New York Times opinion columnist, Lydia Polgreen, to go on a walk with you. In a recent column, she celebrates what she calls the solitary amble and laments the walking date or meeting. "Aimless walking," Polgreen writes, "is a lost art in our ever-optimizing society." Lydia Polgreen joins us now to make her case and take your calls. Hi, Lydia. Thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Lydia Polgreen: Hi, Brian. It's great to be here with you.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we really do want to hear from you. Are you also turning down invitations to go for walks, do you value the time to think too, or do you prefer a social walk? What do your daily walks, if you take daily walks, mean to you? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Maybe you saw Lydia Polgreen's recent New York Times column celebrating the solitary walk and lamenting the social walk called No, I Don’t Want to Go for a Walk With You. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

With your walking and thinking, walking and listening, I walk a lot by myself, but with headphones, walking and talking stories, 212-433-9692. Lydia, what inspired you to write this essay?

Lydia Polgreen: Well, like all great ideas, it came directly from my group chats. Some friends and I were talking about frequently receiving these invitations. Do you want to go for a walk to catch up with somebody or for a meeting? There's something about it that just sticks in my craw because it often feels like a kind of multitasking where walking gets conscripted into getting your steps in as a way to do two things at once and multitask. I have just always felt that walking time is thinking time.

I grew up a free-range Gen X kid in the 1980s and my mom said, "Out of the house. Out of the house. I don't want to see you till dinnertime." I didn't have much else to do, so I would just wander around. That probably feels a little strange to the helicopter parents of these days, but that's how a lot of us grew up. I think the brain just got used to the idea that walking, and particularly this kind of aimless walking, is the perfect way to be alone with your imagination.

There's a lot of literary and scientific examples to back up this idea. For example, Virginia Woolf, she apparently came up with the idea of To the Lighthouse while walking around Tavistock Square. Lots of scientific discoveries happened. Nicholas Tesla, for example, his great insights came on long walks. Even that is a thing that-- I don't think long walks need justification. I don't even care if they create great works of literature or scientific breakthroughs.

There's something about this kind of magic that happens when you lose sight of your body and your mind, just sort of engage with one another and your surroundings and you're just wandering. That's, to me, just such a magical feeling and I don't want that to be conscripted in any other activity. That was the origin, in my case, for going on a nice long walk by yourself.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think there's something about walking per se that makes it such a powerful tool for self-reflection and creativity as opposed to, say, taking yourself out to lunch by yourself but just sitting there?

Lydia Polgreen: Yes. When I was working on this column, I went back to a wonderful book by Rebecca Solnit called Wanderlust and there was this great quote that captured it for me. She writes, "Walking ideally is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned as though they are three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them."

What I love about that is this notion, and the chord is a beautiful metaphor for it, that there is this wonderful alignment that happens between things that normally pull us in different directions, the outside world, our bodies. Am I hungry? Am I tired? In our minds which we're like, "Oh gosh, what's the thing that I forgot to cross off my to-do list?" there's something about occupying all of those things at the same time together that creates this perfect harmony that is really beautiful.

Yes, I think it is different. I'm also a cyclist and I think that cycling can have the same effect. There's something about that combination of attention and inattention, the movement of the body, a certain rhythm, and repetitiveness to the motions that I think really does encourage a type of reflection, imagination, or just daydreaming.

Brian Lehrer: I think Elise, somewhere in the Hudson Valley, is going to make an interesting distinction between a couple of types of walking. Elise, you're on WNYC with Lydia Polgreen. Hi.

Elise: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I'm calling from Kingston or the Kingston area. I used to live in the city. I'm one of the many people who moved up here during the pandemic, up to the Hudson Valley. While I do take a lot of nature walks here and it is beautiful, I really miss New York City walking. It's one of the things I miss most about the city. I just associate it with such a healthy state of being.

It's one of my favorite forms of movement without necessarily like the guest is saying, it's not necessarily adding a mission or a purpose or quantifying footsteps. It's just a matter of being with myself. Again, I do love walking up here, but I just think it's one of the aspects of city living, especially in a city like New York, that is just unparalleled anywhere else.

Brian Lehrer: How would you describe the experience of city walking for you as compared to country walking? What's different about it?

Elise: Naturally, my pace of walking biorhythmically, you just feel a little bit faster in the city. Sometimes, I do find that takes over my natural pace of walking in the city and my gait becomes much quicker, but at the same time-- I'm trying to think. At the same time, even in the city, and I still do make it down to the city frequently, I'll try to slow myself down. It depends on what neighborhood I'm in too. If you're in Midtown, sometimes you just want to get through and get to the other side, and if you're someplace in the West Village, you just want to slow down and appreciate everything.

Brian Lehrer: And look around, yes.

Elise: I think it's also-- Look around so many different people, everything.

Brian Lehrer: Elise, thank you very much. Go ahead, Lydia.

Lydia Polgreen: It's funny. I was just going to say that I love hiking. I love being out in nature, but the interesting paradox is that the spaces for walking in the outdoors outside of the city actually in some ways feel a lot more constrained. Often, if you're in a rural area, there aren't sidewalks. Huge amounts of land are actually not publicly owned, so you can't just go tramping across a field. It probably belongs to someone. It does feel more circumscribed, the kind of walking that you do when you're in a rural place.

Whereas in the city, the assumption is that the majority of people are moving around by means that don't involve a car, hopefully, and so the sidewalks, the parks, everything is oriented towards the needs and interests of pedestrians. What Elise was saying really resonates with me because while I do love walking in nature, there's something strangely freer about walking in the city.

Brian Lehrer: Pamela in Hoboken, you're on WNYC. Hi, Pamela.

Pamela: Hi, Brian. Good morning. I love your show.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Pamela: I can't agree more with your last caller about the feeling of hustling and moving along in Manhattan. I love to walk alone in the city. I live in Hoboken, though in the streets, it's a small city. It's kind of predictable. It's not as exciting and stimulating. I treasure my walks with friends in Hoboken. It breaks up my workday. It's a social way to enjoy someone's company without alcohol, without sitting for too long in a restaurant that's noisy. I think almost 80% of my socializing happens during walks during the day on work breaks. I Love it.

Brian Lehrer: Did you tell our screener that your story about walking with people has something to do with COVID?

Pamela: Yes, because my husband was a front liner, he's a physician in town, and we really had to be super, super-duper careful in our house about exposure. Any contact I had with any friends was always during the pandemic walking outside, and I've just kept doing it since then. My girlfriend and I, literally, we know every week at least once we're going to catch up and hear about each other's lives because we're going to go for that walk, up and down the waterfront, up and down around Stevens campus. That's how we stay together and stay close.

Brian Lehrer: Pamela, thank you very much. Lydia, for you and your preference for walking by yourself, is there a pandemic-era context for this or for the opposite at all because I know so many people like Pamela whose social lives turned into much more walking than they ever were, so they could still be with people but be outside.

Lydia Polgreen: Yes. I think during the pandemic, obviously, walks were a godsend. Being able to go on walks with people was just-- it felt like the only safe way. Of course, we were all cooped up at homes so wanting to move, wanting to have a social connection, and things like that. Look, different strokes for different folks. I think part of my resistance is that walking and talking in some ways got conscripted into a productivity culture and optimization culture that I've always graded against.

Some of the history there comes out of Silicon Valley. You had people like Steve Jobs who obviously was a very influential culture of business person. He loved a walking meeting, and so this idea that you're going to be doubly productive, you're moving your body and you're also having a meeting. I think there's also a gender component to it. I think that for a variety of reasons men perhaps find it harder to connect with others while looking them in the eye.

I think there's some kind of research to back this up. I think that it became in my mind aligned with the kind of hustle culture and technology and productivity that really was against the grain of what I was trying to do with my walks.

Brian Lehrer: We're just about out of time, but I have to sneak in Ashley in Brooklyn because she told our screener she's out on her walk right now. Ashley, we've got 20 seconds for you. Hi there.

Ashley: Hi. Yes, I walk every day. I walk for physical health and mental health, but a very kind of special thing that I have is I walk and read. I've been walking and reading since I was 17-

Brian Lehrer: Oh, careful.

Ashley: -and people always think I'm going to fall or trip, but I never do. I have narcolepsy and if I'm sitting down reading, I fall asleep. I love to read, and so I get all my reading done on my walks.

Brian Lehrer: Audiobooks and sometimes you walk and listen to The Brian Lehrer Show it sounds like?

Ashley: Yes, my friend is listening at home and he texted me, and no I don't listen to books. I read books in my hands. I hold them, I read them, and I walk.

Brian Lehrer: Not in the crosswalks, but Ashley, thank you very much for that last thought. Lydia Polgreen, New York Times opinion columnist and co-host of the Matter of Opinion podcast. Her recent column in the Times opinion section is No, I Don’t Want to Go for a Walk With You. Lydia, thank you for having a conversation with us.

Lydia Polgreen: Thank you, Brian.

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