Walking in the outdoors seems to me so fundamental to sanity and an easy antidote to a frenzied city life that I can’t imagine not having the impulse to go to the forest/bush/coast/mountains by foot regularly. The effects rush in like a flash flood, and take the debris of my nerves with it, leaving me undoubtedly calmer and clearer. And although I know this to be the case, I haven’t often really contemplated why this is, or perhaps that walking in nature serves different purposes for different people, and that throughout history, people have achieved great things just by practicing this simple act of slowness, of silence, of solitude… A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros is that contemplation. Gros, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris XII, has taken a look at the writers, philosophers, mystics, naturalists and thinkers throughout history who have wholeheartedly embraced walking into their lives for different purposes and to different ends – as pilgrimage, as escape, as a way of slowing down, and often as a way …