Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, 2001

As the workday ends, its trail of tickets, pings, docs, and comments clings like static. Still, the personal to-do list waits its turn. There are emails to answer, chats to catch up on, payments to make, and a stream of technological advancements to stay abreast of. More often than not, though, social media claims the evening. The mind needs rest, a pause to sort through its own clutter, but a psyche wired for productivity prefers distraction. We sit, unlock the screen, and begin accumulating new layers of mental residue. The something closest to doing nothing may now be scrolling.

Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking¹, now 24 years old, still speaks with relevance to the psychic strain of contemporary life. With hindsight, the pressures of a production-oriented culture she described were only just beginning to register. Thinking continues to be regarded, in many contexts, as doing nothing. Yet the imperative to account for every pause and to justify each moment as productive has intensified exponentially.

As for walking as a remedy, physical activity has declined across much of the developed world due to the increase in sedentary work, the rise of technology, and the enduring dominance of the car. Walking grows increasingly absent from the average to-do list. But despite everything, from the early internet era to present day, and through a career spent behind screens, I’ve kept walking. More than anything, I owe that to Japan.

Much of Japan is remarkably walkable, but few places stir my wanderlust like Tokyo. I returned late last week from a three-week stint in the city, where most days involved at least 10,000 steps, and many exceeded 20,000 or 30,000. While in Tokyo, I’m at my least productive in terms of ticking off tasks; the to-do list I come home to is invariably daunting. But as Solnit observes, walking draws out thought, and I’ve noticed a correlation between step count and the clarity of those thoughts. As much as I enjoy Japan’s recreational delights, it turns out this is where I come to think.

Tokyothèque typically explores Tokyo’s design and culture, but one thread runs through it all: whatever the subject, your author is on foot. Recently, all that walking led to thinking about walking, and about why walking in Tokyo, of all places, feels so rewarding. This week, I zoom out from the city to share a few thoughts on the act of walking itself, and on the ways in which I walk through Tokyo.