title: Perfect Motion: Walking, creativity and writing
Creators: name: Lineen, Jonathan
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: bipedal locomotion
subject: idea generation
subject: walking
subject: creativity
subject: writing

description: This thesis Perfect Motion: Walking, creativity and writing examines the relationship between walking, creativity and writing. My explorations started with a list of canonical writers who generated their best ideas while out for a walk and ended up amongst research studies such as that by a team at Stanford University proving that walking positively influences the generation of creative ideas (Oppezzo &amp; Schwartz, 2014, p.1142). The questions this thesis addresses, in a creative manner, are: How does walking affect creativity? And how does that creativity affect the writing of stories? The investigation begins by considering the evolutionary basis for the symbiosis between human bipedal locomotion and the generation of ideas, and how this link developed over millions of years to become a catalyst in the cognitive transformation of Homo erectus and then Homo sapiens. Here I refer to the work of Daniel Lieberman and Linda Gabora. I describe my own toddler son’s challenges in learning to walk as a personal reflection on how everyone has a connection to our species’ eternal desire to rise up and walk on two feet. These evolutionary observations lead to an inquiry into the neuroscience of humankind’s most creative mindset, the flow state, and how walking is the simplest way to generate this condition. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Merlin Donald, John Ratey and Arne Dietrich are four of the main sources raised in this section. My contemplations on personal experience with the flow state, in sports and hunting, creatively highlight flow’s capacity to transport anyone into a different, more open state of mind. For four million years, heroes walked their journeys of discovery. I investigate how the archaic connection between walking, wisdom and self-realisation has translated into one of humankind’s most powerful story structures: the journey narrative. Joseph Campbell, Stephen Mithen and Brian Boyd contribute to my argument in this chapter. To emphasize the connection between the walking journey and personal narrative I frame a walk that I undertook during the Sierra Leonean civil war, in the classic hero’s journey structure. The body is our interpreter of the world; our moving bodies bring the broader world to us. It’s a simple fact, easily ignored: walking engages us with the world. I investigate this through phenomenological philosophy and embodied cognition and use personal experiences with corporeal interpretations of life events to emphasize the moving body’s role in our understanding of reality. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Evan Thompson add philosphical support in this area. Every step you take is one second. Walking has helped create our sense of time, and time is essential to the telling of stories. Moreover, walking has the ability to release stories gathered in a landscape and a body. To bring these claims to life I recount times when I’ve felt time speed up and slow down dependent upon walking, and use a bush walk I took with my children to an Indigenous rock art site to support how stories stratified within a landscape are released as we move through it. In this chapter George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Lera Boroditsky provide evidence around this assertation. Pilgrimage has been practiced since at least the time of the Buddha, 2500 years ago, and walking has been the preferred, and sometimes requisite, locomotion for pilgrims. I investigate the connection between walking pilgrimage and creativity through Victor and Edith Turner’s research into liminality and how walking can take you out of your everyday environment to generate new ideas. Using a series of personal pilgrimages, I emphasize how walking with purpose changes lives and perceptions. Perseverance is one of writing’s most important, but least discussed, skills and walking is a way to energize that ability. By incorporating ideas around persistence and constancy from Haruki Murakami, Malcolm Gladwell and Damon Young into personal stories about tree planting and marathon running, I highlight the conjecture that anyone, with persistence, can become an expert. Finally, by relating one of the most joyful walks in my life, a passage out of a hostage-taking situation in the Nepali Himalayas, I stress an aspect of walking that everyone can tap into: its ability to generate joy. The exegetical afterword to this thesis uses a series of walks to physically engage the reader with the felt body and asks them to consider my reflections on how this PhD submission adds to the body of knowledge on creative writing.