Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.

“Wanderlust is a delightful, mind-expanding journey that strays from Søren Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen and William Wordsworth’s Lake District to the top of Everest and the New Mexico desert, from the first hominids to walk upright to contemporary women who face the hazards of solitary walking,” wrote Andrew O’ Hehir in Salon.

Solnit, in search of the multiple meanings of walking, traces it back to religious pilgrimages, nomadic tribes, and the evolutionary leap that took place when homo sapiens first stood erect and decided to go out to eat. She talks of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Kierkegaard and Wordsworth to explain the long historical association between walking and philosophising.

She then moves to the city, “where walking opens up seemingly endless new doors of discovery, reclaiming space that typically belongs to criminals, and then the suburbs where people walk in their own spare rooms, on machines that go nowhere.” Solnit establishes a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture and argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.