It Is Solved by Walking
Better living and work through a surprisingly relevant two-thousand-year-old phrase.
There’s a Latin phrase you’ve probably met on a wellness blog or a productivity podcast: solvitur ambulando. “It is solved by walking.”
It almost always arrives the same way. Stuck? Take a walk. Clear your head. Come back to the desk with the answer.
That advice is fine. It’s also the smallest room in a very large house.
Because solvitur ambulando doesn’t mean one thing. It means at least six. And the disagreement between them is the interesting part.
CSA: This article is the seed for this week’s Friday on Purpose call. Circle members — your breakout prompt is at the bottom. Not in The Circle yet? Details below.
The story everyone gets wrong.
The phrase is usually credited to Diogenes — who supposedly refuted a philosopher claiming motion was an illusion by simply standing up and walking around. Case closed. Theory loses to a man on his feet.
It’s a great story. But it just didn’t happen that way. The two philosophers in the legend lived a century apart. They were never in a room together.
And the Latin phrase itself isn’t ancient. Its earliest recorded use is a 1852 letter by a Victorian poet, not a word of Augustine or Diogenes.
So the tidy origin is a myth. Which is fitting. Because the truth underneath it is stranger and more useful. The phrase contradicts itself, and that’s the point.
The two readings that pull against each other.
One reading says: stop thinking and move. The problem isn’t hard, you’re just overthinking it. Walk, act, demonstrate. Prove the thing by doing the thing. The startup founder who stops planning the launch and just ships. The argument you end not by winning it but by walking away or right on past it.
The other reading says the opposite: move in order to think. Here, the walk isn’t an escape from thought. It is the thinking, just in a better key.
Rousseau couldn’t reflect unless his legs were moving. Rebecca Solnit calls it a state where mind, body, and world finally align — “three notes suddenly making a chord.”
One says deliberation is the enemy. The other says walking is deliberation done right.
Both are true. They just answer different problems. And knowing which problem you actually have is most of the work.
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The reading nobody quotes (and the one you need most).
There’s a third interpretation, quieter than the others, and it belongs to anyone building something that didn’t exist yesterday.
The poet Antonio Machado: “Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar.” “Walker, there is no path. The path is made by walking.”
Not walk to find the path. There is no path to find. The road appears not in front of your gaze but under your feet.
This is the one that should stop a solopreneur cold. Because so much of the stuckness isn’t a thinking problem or an action problem. It’s a map problem. You’re standing at the trailhead waiting to see the whole route before you’ll take the first step — and the route, by its nature, will not appear until you do.
You were never going to be able to see it from here. That’s not a flaw in your planning.
That’s the terrain.
So what do you actually do with this?
Notice which problem you have before you reach for the solution.
If you’re spinning on a question that doesn’t need more analysis — walk to interrupt it. Move, act, ship, let the doing settle it.
If you’re genuinely thinking something through — walk to deepen it. Let the rhythm do what the chair couldn’t.
And if you’re frozen at the trailhead, waiting for a map that isn’t coming — walk to create the path. Take one real step into the unknown and watch the next one appear. Then the one after that.
Three different ailments. One old prescription. The wisdom is in the diagnosis.
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The richest version of this practice isn’t solo, though. It’s what happens when you walk a hard question alongside people who are walking their own — and the road shows up for all of you at once.
That’s a lot of what we do inside The Circle: weekly Monday on Purpose calls, breakout rooms, and the company of other creatives making the path by walking it.
→ Circle & Inner Circle breakout prompt for our Friday on Purpose call: Bring one thing you’re currently stuck on. Before the call, decide which kind of stuck it is: a thinking problem (walk to deepen), an overthinking problem (walk to interrupt), or a map problem (walk to make the road). We’ll work them in the breakout rooms — and notice how often we reach for the wrong cure.
I will save this forever!! All three of the walking explanations are a part of me. Thank you!!
Looking forward to the Circle conversation today!