I have so many photos I want to post of London, and I don’t normally post more than one photo a day on Instagram (odd personal rule of my own), but I wrote for more than seven hours today—those book edits? They’ve only just BEGUN!—and so now I’ve walked for more than three hours to clear my head. Yesterday I visited Charles Dickens’ house (thank you for the tip @sccheney81) and there was a note on his personal writing desk that said he almost always took a long walk after intensive periods of writing. I didn’t know that so many writers do this, but that note made me understand why I can find the words to finish a sentence if I just get up and walk to the other room. We are like dogs who need the monotony of the long journey underneath our feet to tame the jumbled chaos in our heads. That mileage is the only thing keeping us from spinning madly off the edge of the world. Paragraphs come to us in the form of footsteps. And so I walk.
