Editor’s Note – David G. Allan is the editorial director for CNN Travel, Style, Science and Wellness. This essay is part of a column called The Wisdom Project, which you can subscribe to here.
(CNN) — Some have a designated place to pray. I have a designated place to think. You can of course pray or think anywhere, but some places are by design or their nature more conducive to going deeper.
My secular cathedral is San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, found on the western edge of the city, above Golden Gate Park, view sea and sky and accessible as the end of the wavy N Judah line of the city’s MUNI light rail.
There I routinely return to sort myself out, practice a bit of philosophy and do some dirt on the meaning of life. Walking along this wide, three-and-a-half kilometers of nature is how I think my best.
Just as churches, synagogues and mosques are built to encourage worship, reflection and communion with the community and one God, there are naturally places that similarly focus the mind and bring an experience of awe. There is something almost mystical about such places, the way they embrace the light, or change your point of reference, or surround you with a heightened sense of beauty.
What started as a New Year’s resolution to watch the sunset once a month when I lived in San Francisco has become a ritual and now that I don’t live there, a pilgrimage.
My personal tradition begins at the Java Beach coffee shop across the Great Highway from the water. I enjoy a coffee and pastry while writing in my journal, until you see the sun start to dip below the dunes, and I cross the road and find a rod in the sand.
Watching the sun melt into the Pacific Ocean is a guaranteed climax experience, as the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow would have said.
Such perfect moments dissolve the thin line between the self and the thing being experienced until there is only the experience itself. For a brief moment there is no one watching the sunset, just the sunset. And when I break out of the reverie, I begin my mindwalk.
A walking meditation
Thinking and walking, as a conscious pair, has roots that go back to Ancient Greece and the sophists who wandered and imagined themselves in the growing marketplace of ideas. See the article : Meghan Markle invests heavily in health as Duchess’ ‘£45,000 lifestyle expenses’ go unpaid. Aristotle’s school of Peripatetic philosophers was named after the colonnade or promenade (peripatos) that was an important feature of his university, and it is believed that Aristotle himself taught while on the move.
A view of Sutro Heights from sunset on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach
Photo: Pedro Freitas/iStockphoto/Getty Images
The names of thinkers who went to “move” their thoughts read like the canon familiar to all philosophy – which I once was.
Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein thought. Thomas Hobbes’s walking stick includes an inkwell for taking spontaneous notes. Søren Kierkegaard wrote about Copenhagen’s Philosopher’s Way, Georg Hegel traversed Heidelberg’s Philosophenweg and Immanuel Kant took daily walks along Königsberg’s Philosopher’s Dam.
In Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”—a book I read while taking a series of walks through Central Park, years after I began my Ocean Beach tradition—the author includes a chapter on Jean -Jacques Rousseau titled “The Spirit at Three Miles an Hour.” Rousseau explained the connection between philosophizing and walking, marking pedestrianism as something deeper than mere transportation, but as a conscious cultural act.
“Never have I thought so much… as in the journeys I made alone and on foot,” he wrote in his autobiographical “Confessions”. “There’s something about walking that stimulates and invigorates my mind…my body needs to be on the move to settle my mind.” One of Rousseau’s last works was entitled “Reveries of a Solitary Walker”.
For my Ocean Beach walks, which I continue when I visit my old home, I decide on a theme in advance. Sometimes it’s a question like “Can people make themselves happy just by choosing to be happy?” or “Is religion more than ethics plus ritual?”
But mostly I struggled with questions about how to live my life. The most life-changing decision I made on that beach was whether to ask my girlfriend, then of just a few months, if I could follow her to Bangkok where she was traveling for a fellowship. I decided I had to, and did. She said yes, and we have been married for 19 years now. On my last visit, I sorted out a resolution related to our teenage daughter.
The Latin expression solvitur ambulando, “many things are solved by walking”, sums it up well. There is an Eskimo custom, for example, in which you vent your anger by going on until the emotion stops. You then mark the spot before going back, as a physical representation of the magnitude of the feeling. I recognize the power of such walking therapy.
San Francisco’s Ocean Beach is rarely crowded.
This must be the place
But for me it’s not just the foot. On the same subject : Things to do in Long Beach: dog walks, scuba diving, live music and breathing. It’s the place. Time-forsaken Ocean Beach, which runs from the Cliff House at the north end to the San Francisco Zoo near the other, is ideal for this secular religious task.
It is a dreamy expanse at dusk, with the sky upside down in the reflection of the water. Add the eternal waves, crisp air and the impermanence of my footprints and it’s like walking through a Zen Beat poem. I sometimes lose my mind in the gray sea or big clouds, but I stay, and go until I reach a conclusion or determination.
San Francisco weather is consistently fall or colder, Ocean Beach is never crowded. Other than surfers in 7-millimeter thick wetsuits, some go deeper than their ankles in the freezing water. In between, people walk their dogs and the occasional runner walks long stretches where no one can hear you talking to yourself except the sandpipers, who are too busy dodging the surf to pay attention.
There are occasional enclaves of sunset watchers, couples huddled under Indian blankets and neo-hippies organizing a bonfire. High dunes separate the beach from a commercial-free boardwalk and highway traffic.
In recent years, the dunes have gradually overcome the road, and a large part is closed to cars. And on the edge of Golden Gate Park, there is a wild angle of Monterey cypress and other canopy trees framed by two windmill ruins. It doesn’t feel like you’re in a city at all.
Perhaps the nascent, and pseudo, science of psychogeography explains the fact that this place affects me in a way that other places do not. Where the continent meets the sea is the end of the earth and the beginning of a new adventure, the proverbial edge before the leap, a literal line in the sand.
Under the big sky and in the refreshing weather everything seems possible and contemplative in this place, and others like it. It reminds us to be humble and grateful when travel reveals places that speak to us so strongly that just walking through them changes us for the better.
Top image: Sunset on Ocean Beach, San Francisco (Jonathan Clark/Moment Open/Getty Images)
