As summer gives way to autumn, I’ve been aware of my usual longing for more sun for longer, and aware also of the counterweight to that, stronger than it used to be: wanting to cultivate appreciation of old-world beauties rather than resenting them for not being, say, some year-round replica of LA weather at its best. LA doesn’t have that, and Oxford certainly never will—and this summer’s long drought made it obvious why it shouldn’t.
Exploring the River Thames
On the bank holiday weekend at the end of August, I went for a walk along the Thames a few miles upriver from where my boat is moored. Since coming back from my 2024 in California I’ve done quite a few Cotswolds and other local-ish weekend walks, and exploring more of the Thames felt fitting for a few reasons:
- The Thames is the home of my boat, and I’d like to know better the stretches that aren’t through and near Oxford.
- Like all waterways, it offers us a way of exploring the country from different angles than roads and railways and even most footpaths allow. I love the canals that wind along below foot level through urban shopping centres, and the watery ways into cities that skirt the sprawl, and the miles upon miles of meticulously built and named and numbered stone bridges and swing bridges and locks that cobweb the British countryside.
- Even more than other rivers and canals, the Thames (and its upper reaches, known as the Isis) is central to the country’s natural-cultural mythologies. It not only flows under Tower Bridge and past the Houses of Parliament, it’s been immortalized by The Wind in the Willows and Great Expectations and Three Men in a Boat, and has thus poured itself into ideas about what Englishness means—something I’ve been thinking a lot about since deciding not to move to America.
- Having loved walking the ancient Ridgeway with a friend over several seasons, the Thames is (I realized this only en route) a serious candidate for another multi-leg expedition, this one poised between land and river. The 185 miles of the Thames Path follow the water’s meanders from the Cotswolds to the Thames Barrier, and even the stretch from Oxford to Lechlade (the head of the navigable river) and on to the source is a solid 50-odd miles. Something to keep me busy this autumn and winter, perhaps!
A lesser-known volume with lovely bits of Thames in it, read with a hot cross bun in a Thames-side field in the spring of 2025.
Having deadlines for thinking
On this particular Sunday, I had a conference talk to give two days later, so I used the outward stretch to iron out my ideas and rehearse the key bits of wording under my breath—a habit learnt from my mother, who taught me early on in my academic life to rebel against the humanities tradition of reading from a script.
The process of putting together this talk was, as usual, a mixture of enjoyment and stress. But, on the theme of cultivating appreciations, I also found myself reflecting, as I walked, that the slight stress is often part of what makes a thought process work, and happen at all. There’s often something that the thinking is needed for, some deadline for the mental aliveness to yield something up—if not, often we wouldn’t bother.
(As a meta-aside: I do not want my blogs or newsletters to be the sort of thing I have to write according to an arbitrary schedule even if I have nothing to say—that’s a massive waste of my time and yours. But I put “brainstorm newsletter ideas, start drafting one” on my plan for the week because I had a vague sense that 1) it’s been a while since the last and 2) nice thinking does tend to happen when I sit down to it. And then so much thinking happened that it took several weeks and I decided to turn this into a blog post with a Substack taster!)
Part of me resented not being able to be totally relaxed during that walk and let my mind wander at will. But another part of me recognised that I do have plenty of patches of a typical week where my mind has that freedom, and that it’s therefore all right, even good, to sometimes have to choose qualities other than relaxation to optimize for. After all, the contemporary obsession with relaxation and self-care wouldn’t exist if the baseline weren’t so frantic, so when it isn’t, we get to aspire to other states.
Two kinds of cognitive privilege
There are two intertwined personal privileges here:
- the fact that relaxation needn’t be the constant ideal and
- the fact that life does offer up such time-limited invitations to be cognitively alive.
It’s easy to slightly resent the second of these when you have it, and then to waste it because it’s more work than not having it. I often think of how common it still seems to be at British weddings for women to say nothing, to let themselves instead be talked about by the groom and the best man and the father of the bride. Because of course it’s easier not to give a speech than to give one, and of course it’s easy to forget how hard-won the right to speak has been, and how quickly it withers if unexercised.
Some recent reading had sharpened my ability to cherish instead of resent: A great Aeon article called “The fog of hunger”, on the huge cognitive cost of girls being trained from very young to ignore their appetite. And a devastating New York Times piece on the Taliban’s prohibition on secondary education for girls, and how some girls are going to hidden classrooms or failing their final permitted year on purpose, to try to scrape a bit of an education together before it’s too late.
The mechanisms of entrapment are not the same:
- “I see the Taliban in my dreams,” she said. “They’re running after us, beating us and closing the school.”
- “Attention is finite. Hunger takes some of it. What it takes cannot at the same time be used for anything else.”
But whether it comes from violently external oppression or the quieter internalized kind, the sheer extent of lost female intellectual liberty, down the ages and still today, is sobering to think about.
And so I feel more layers of gratitude:
- to have been born in a time and place where I could have a marvellous education and do more or less what I wanted with it, and also
- to have had an eating disorder and got fully over it.
The combination is a splendid mental-space-opening pairing. In a Psychology Today blog post at the start of this year, I wrote about “the beauty of living in fully uncurious congruence with your appetites”, and as I reread Sarah Berg’s Aeon piece now, I am more grateful than I can say that I am not, in my mid-40s, left asking this sort of question about my own life: “What might women have thought about if the noise had not been there? What arguments finished, what ideas followed all the way to the end, what patience held long enough to matter?” I lost ten years of clear thinking to self-starvation, but I’ve had nearly 20 to savour since then.
Letting thinking be bodily and take time
And coming back to my riverside talk-planning, I think of an essay by my mother called “Losing our hands”. She wasn’t worried about them getting chopped off; she was reflecting, 12 years ago, on how willingly we’re ceding our practical skills, as digital-everything claims to be better, cooler, faster, more interesting. And thus we’re stopping being the kinds of body-minds who know how to learn things with our limbs.
She doesn’t talk about thinking itself as an example of the body skills being ceded, but I’m often reminded of how corporeal it is—whether or not we encourage it to be, but especially when we do. Thinking is obviously manual in that it occurs, rather than just being recorded, via the hands that scribble or type. And it can be cajoled in more expansive directions by big horizons, buffeted by fresh breezes, made rhythmic by feet, punctuated by pulling on tough brambles.
There’s a nice New Yorker piece on walking and thinking, speculating about the benefits of the “unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state” that’s activated when we walk at our own pace. And we know a little about walking and thinking outdoors from systematic experiments. One found support for the hypothesis that the way our attention is “modestly” grabbed by natural environments makes it better for memory and attentional skills than the way urban settings more “dramatically” capture it (Berman et al., 2008). Another set of experiments by researchers at Stanford (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014) compared cognition whilst 1) sitting at a desk facing a blank wall with 2) walking on a treadmill facing a blank wall, 3) walking outdoors, and 4) being rolled in a wheelchair outdoors, in “a busy, albeit lovely, university campus”. They found that the walking-outside condition “produced the most novel and highest quality analogies” in a divergent-thinking task (generating lots of ideas from a single starting point), whereas for convergent thinking (narrowing down possibilities to find a single correct or optimal solution) performance was mildly impaired by walking. (A recent meta-analysis [Thabane et al., 2026] confirms the main result here, finding “moderate certainty evidence of a large effect of walking on divergent thinking”.)
As the Stanford researchers say, this sort of work raises lots more questions: for example, what about rolling oneself in a wheelchair, engaging in a different “comfortable task” like knitting, walking alone instead of chatting to a researcher, walking at a pace other than one’s natural stride—and also, I want to add, walking in a lovely and not-busy environment, the kind I naturally seek out for any kind of thinking-whilst-walking? (Though if one has to conduct such research on a university campus, Stanford’s palm-studded one is amongst the most glorious imaginable!)
I’ve also worked with many people for whom walking gets tightly bound into pathologies of pushing and counting and never resting, and in such contexts—and any other where walking is difficult or impossible—it’s important to get creative with ways of heightening body awareness that don’t involve even medium-level exertion. And to get honest about our motivations, too, as moulded by social pressures shouting “the more exercise the better” at every turn. Embodied thinking is just a fig leaf if really it’s all about body control.
My late-summer paddling place.
So, anyway, with my talk prep done and my mind roaming freer, I walked by the Isis and had a paddle and sat and ate a chocolate and walked on again, and perhaps my central conclusion was twofold:
- that it’s crucial not to pretend that thinking is a disembodied thing (and how strange that we humans have ever managed to kid ourselves that it could be, given that the brain is just one organ, given that the heavy head sits so precariously atop the spine, given that the nerve relays around the “central” and “peripheral” nervous systems are all so massively interconnected, given that no one who has looked carefully has ever found “mind” showing itself separable from “body”);
- and also that it’s important not to pretend that ideally, thinking would always be quick and easy (you need a reason to bother, now, but then you need to not insist on being finished as soon as you’ve started).
In my academic coaching work, and in my weekly writing meetups with a colleague, I’m often struck how much it matters to be able to reassure ourselves that the feeling of battling, or of not quite getting it, or of finding it too complicated, is a big part of why we’re doing it. As organisms optimized for mere survival, we seek ease in all things. But as creatures whose evolutionary selection pressures are not only genetic, we also seek out difficulty as a proxy for purpose, and perhaps as a proxy for aliveness, for distinctness amidst the vastness. Allowing the course of our thinking to be slow and serpentine is usually how it gets to feel like anything at all—let alone feel like me.
Feeling like ourselves
Being coached myself a couple of years ago, I loved being asked this question: “When do you feel most yourself?” I worked my way towards an answer: First I said “When out hiking in mountains in the sunshine.” Then I said “And also when writing.” And then I put the two together: “Maybe when writing in my head out hiking sums it up best.” I think I had the brain in a vat idea in mind when I added: “not just an empty jar in a forest”. I’ve never liked walking under tree cover, and I love feeling arms and legs and neck and torso doing clever un-jar-like things under wide skies.
Scribbling down the fruits of some thinking-through-walking-and-talking before I forget them, for a different academic talk, in my beloved San Gabriels on my birthday this February.
And there’s a social dimension to this too, sometimes: two not-jars walking and thinking together in conversation. I relish the kind of walking-and-talking companionship where silence is easy, where the topics are responsive to the setting but also have a momentum and shape concocted in the air between the two of us. I hope to walk with such companions sometimes this autumn and winter.
So, well, this post has grown as meandering as the upper reaches of a determined river! But I’ve liked the difficulties of connecting autumn with feminism, feminism with slowing down, slowing down with thinking through our bodies, thinking through our bodies with coming to know ourselves. I’ll close with another line from Berg’s Aeon essay:
“A well-fed woman is harder to dismiss. Harder to exhaust. Harder to convince that her own thinking is not worth following to its end.”
Thank you, chickens and cows and farmers, for my scrambled eggs on buttered bread this morning, and for all the other meals before and after my other times spent sitting and standing and walking whilst drafting and musing on this piece, for making my thinking possible.
And thank you, dear reader, for being a person for whom to write, and therefore to bother thinking!