As I have so many days recently, I headed out this morning in a hooded jacket. The rain was so fine you could barely see it. There were no beads of moisture on my sleeves, but I could feel the dampness all around me.

I’d just been reading an academic article, and it felt good to stretch my legs. I wasn’t looking for much, just a break. But the ideas bubbled up anyway, as they often do when I’m moving. First the topic for this post, then an essay idea.

The mist may have made it harder to see what was in front of me, but it didn’t obscure my thinking. How to account for this phenomenon?

“Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust: A History of Walking. And a few sentences later, she says this: “It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination.”

And that’s what this morning’s walk was for me — travel and destination.