Although separated by more than a Century, both Charles Dickens and Patsy Cline were onto something similar. They both advocated for walking after midnight. Cline’s hit song from 1957 positions nocturnal walking as a soothing balm for heartbreak, whereas Dickens’ perambulations appeased insomnia and unleashed creativity. How much might Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol be credited to walking?
Walking after midnight
As Dickens outlines in “Night walks”, he suffered from periods of severe insomnia. A common approach to sleeplessness might involve simply staying at home and just waiting in futility for sleep to arrive. Insomnia, Charles Dickens wrote, “might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed.” Yet, it was “soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise.”
Putting aside the nighttime aspect of his rambles, walking is an excellent activity for releasing creativity. Any motor activity, really, that involves locomotor activity can serve this end. Be it walking, running, swimming, cross-country skiing, rowing, and more. Rhythmic sensorimotor activation during more automatic patterns has a useful releasing capacity on behavior.
Shuffling off this mortal coil
Imagination is at the core of creativity. Marleide by Mota Gomes and Antonio E. Nardi explained that “the virtual dream world was central to Dickens’ narrative structure and was fundamental to his work process, social engagement, and fantasy.” They further echo that imagination is key to engendering sympathy across classes and backgrounds of people in society. Further, they suggest that “For Dickens, science should excite, rather than reductively explain, imagination and the bonds that forge it between people.”
Charles Dickens himself wrote that problems and concerns were put out of mind and sight, such that his brain “had many miles upon miles of streets in which it could, and did, have its own solitary way.”
Your brain is great, but sometimes you need to get it out of its own way
Rukhsana Rahim Chowdhury wrote that Charles Dickens’ “flight from physical problems like insomnia and internal troubles like being haunted by the past” were addressed by a helpful need “to walk and walk and walk in the darkness and pattering rain.” I would suggest that this habit of getting out for a walk in the rain was to do something different with his brain.
The takeaway, here, during the holidays and all year round, is this: Get out of your own way. Let yourself do activities that will enable you to release your brain from focusing on your thoughts so you can relate more to your actions. Perhaps counterintuitively, this will help release your own creativity. Automatic activities allow brain networks to do their thing, including creative thinking. During my decades as a research scientist and writer of books, many, many of my good ideas have come while walking and cycling. In other words, doing things (movements) that are actually not directly related to the things I need help with end up helping the most. This itself is a form of mindfulness with helpful outcomes. Along with Charles Dickens, we can always strive to practice mindful movement, and it doesn’t have to be at midnight.
(c) E. Paul Zehr (2025)
