The Thinking Path

“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next.
That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”
(Ernest Hemingway)

“Wanderer on the sea of fog”. Caspar David Friedrich, 1818 

This time I want to tell you about a really interesting article that I read a while ago. 

It's an article by Thomas Oppong on the habits of genius minds to organize their time and where they drew inspiration for their ideas. 

For me, it was a pleasant confirmation, because I am fond of some routines during the day. 

Moreover, there are not a few people who, in these months of intense and daily writing for the blog, have asked me what was the secret to having continuous inspiration. 

My answer was always the same: try to walk every day. The best ideas often come to me while walking. 

Of course, there is a whole work upstream made up of reading, viewing photographs, and paintings; all this settles in the bottom, ferments, but to have that flicker that transforms them into an idea for an article, I need to walk. 

As I said, I am indissolubly tied to some daily practices, the lack of which could make me go wrong the whole day. 

For example, I drink coffee at home every day in two different colored cups, one blue for the morning and one green for lunch; never reverse them. 

I also brought them with me in the two years that I lived in Malaysia. 

In the morning, I have been having breakfast for forty years with a croissant stuffed with blueberry jam and coffee. 

Every birthday I have to eat a slice of tiramisù.  

When I open a book that I have just bought the first thing I do is smell the pages. 

I could go on with this for long. 

Psychologically the explanation is very simple.  

These obligatory “ritual” actions serve to shore up the chaos inside me. The collapse of one of these props brings me closer to inner disorder. 

The same goes for writing. I always write first with a pen in a notebook, then on the computer. Nine times out of ten late at night, when the brain is in limbo between waking and sleep and is more fluid in the imagination. 

And then there is walking, which is of great help in coming up with ideas. 

The brain is like a muscle, it must be kept in training. 

It's true that it is difficult to think and write interesting things every day, for months. Many times I have failed, and on the weekend I rest. 

But it is also true that constancy helps strengthen thinking. The more you think, the more ideas flourish. 

So I was intrigued by this article which quotes Mason Currey's book, “Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration and Get to Work”. 

"Extraordinary minds start their day on purpose."  Aristotle said, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.' Routine provides a sense of structure and familiarity. You wake up with a sense of ownership, order, and organization of life.” 

I still remember when in high school, my classmates and I made fun of the poet Giacomo Leopardi and his “sweaty papers”, chained to his desk, still a teenager, studying tomes and tomes and writing until his body hunched up. 

He called it “crazy and desperate study”, which led him from 1809 to 1816 to learn Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, English, French, German, and Sanskrit on his own. At 11 years old! 

And his “Canti” and “Operette morali” are among the absolute peaks of Italian poetry and literature.

  

Giacomo Leopardi, drawn by Tullio Pericoli 

The secret of routines is that they free the brain from small decisions, such as unloading excess ballast, allowing it to act more easily. 

A great walker was the German philosopher Nietzsche. Every morning he got up at dawn and walked until eleven in the morning. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” he said. 

Immanuel Kant, another fundamental philosopher, got up every morning at 5 o'clock, drank a cup of tea and smoked a pipe. That smoking moment was his time for meditation. 

Charles Dickens also walked every day, three or four hours every afternoon. 

Ludwig Van Beethoven used to walk after lunch, carrying pen and paper with him to jot down the inspiration when he arrived. 

Scientist Nikola Tesla traveled ten miles a day. 

Charles Darwin even had a “thinking path”, a path of walking through the forest near his home that never changed, and which helped him during the conception of his theory of evolution. 

It reminded me that it was the same for me during the months of lockdown: I always drove the same two kilometers, in a circle, close to home, every day. 

So it was not only walking that was a habit but also the path, making it even more simple and basic: I didn't even have to think about where to go – the mind was completely free and prolific. 

These anecdotes about the life of philosophers, writers and geniuses are interesting and amusing; obviously, It's not a creativity cookbook. 

It's not that by walking every day for hours with pen and paper we are able to compose the Fifth Symphony, nor being tied to the chair for hours allows us to write the sublime verses of Giacomo Leopardi’s “L'infinito”. 

Nor can I recommend walking or some other habit to get good ideas for writing. Everyone finds their own way.  Of course, thinking can be a habit. An exercise. 

If laziness of movement makes the body fat and sluggish, even mental laziness does not make us creative. 

The “thinking path” is within each of us. Don't be intimidated by the bad reputation that the term “habitual” has. There is no sweeter jam than new thoughts and fresh ideas that mark your every day. 

Sweeter even than blueberries. 

My two coffee cups 

 

READ ALSO:

• Archeology of A Passion  
• Number 100 

The daily habits of great minds: Lessons from Nietzsche, Kant, Tesla, Darwin, Einstein And Hemingway by Thomas Oppong

Mason Currey: “Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration and Get to Work” (Picador, 2013)

Italian version