Note that I got this from Instagram:
In 1847, Søren Kierkegaard’s sister-in-law lay in bed for months.
Henriette was married to his older brother Peter. She had been unwell for years with what the age called hypochondria, a word that then meant a low, heavy melancholy (not an imagined illness). She rarely left the house.
Kierkegaard was 34 and knew the weight well. He called it his thorn in the flesh, wrote about it all his life, and never expected to be rid of it.
What he had instead was Copenhagen. He wrote at a standing desk through the morning, then went out into the streets. He walked the parks, the new pavements, the cemetery where he would eventually be buried. He zigzagged, crossed without warning, stopped strangers and talked. He called the city his immersion in people. It was how he thought, and the only thing that reliably lifted him.
A year before this letter, a satirical paper called The Corsair began drawing him with a hunched back and one trouser leg shorter than the other. You cannot publish a denial about the length of your trousers. Within months he was the city’s walking caricature and children mocked him in the street. It ended his habit of walking Copenhagen in conversation.
So when he told Henriette that health and salvation are found only in motion, he was writing about the thing he had just lost.
She didn’t take the advice. He wrote again, more urgently, telling her that she was always in some measure suffering, and that the task was to turn that suffering into the expectation of joy. He told her it was really possible.
In October 1855 he collapsed in the street. He died a month later, at 42. We don’t know if Henriette ever took his advice, but we can right now.
Dickens walked twenty miles at a stretch through London at night. Wordsworth is estimated to have walked 180,000 miles in his life. Nietzsche said the only thoughts worth anything come while walking. Beethoven walked every afternoon with a pencil. It improves health, happiness, creativity. The ancients had a phrase: solvitur ambulando, ‘it is solved by walking.’
In 1847, Søren Kierkegaard wrote to a woman too depressed to get out of bed. He had one piece of advice.
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. Even if one were to walk for one’s health and it were constantly one station ahead–I would still say: Walk! Besides, it is also apparent that in walking one constantly gets as close to well-being as possible, even if one does not quite reach it–but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Health and salvation can be found only in motion. If anyone denies that motion exists, I do as Diogenes did, I walk. If anyone denies that health resides in motion, then I walk away from all morbid objections. Thus, if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.
My Comment: How unfortunate that Søren Kierkegaard wasn’t able to do his walking in solitude in Nature and the awful newspaper wouldn’t have brought him down. Walk in solitude in Nature if you possibly can!
One Seeker's Story 