The Scenic Route Starts at Safety Town
+ a walking & creativity study and a writing prompt
Welcome to new subscribers to Writing in Company. I’m glad you are here! Each week I share a brief thought and a writing prompt. They are meant to be a jumping-off point for you to do some writing on your own about what matters. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation ideas, or for another creative endeavor. Grab your pen and paper, and enjoy.
In the interest of health—physical and mental—my husband Dan and I are trying to walk more. We still mourn that our recent move was away from the Blue Ridge Parkway’s access to mountainous hiking trails. We now live in a community rated a “car-dependent” 3 out of 10 on the walkability score. We walk the dog down the street for her daily sniff-fests, but longer walks necessitate a drive first. Fortunately, there are plenty of places nearby to park and wander.
Dan grew up in nearby Greensboro, so many of our wanderings—by car or otherwise—take us back to his old stomping grounds. This was true for our most recent walk on the A & Y Greenway.
The walk down memory lane started at Safety Town—a project sponsored by local police and other civic groups. It’s been operating for 40 years as a summer camp for 5 and 6-year-olds. Hundreds of kids learn all sorts of safety lessons, but the highlight has got to be the wheeled portion. They strap on bike helmets, buckle up on cool trike/go-cart hybrids, and learn the rules of the road while pedaling around a small replica of a town with a train track, crosswalks, and traffic signals.
Dan remembers volunteering for it back when he rode his bike there, the kids rode plastic big wheels, and no one wore helmets.
I would have been happy to spend more time gazing through the fence at Safety Town, but the A & Y Greenway beckoned. The path is the ghost of a small rail line stretching from Greensboro to Mt. Airy. As a preteen, Dan rode his bike or walked along it—one direction to get to a park and Safety Town, and the other direction to get to the pool. The stretch we walked still winds between his old neighborhood, the Toyota dealership, the backdoor dumpsters of a strip mall, and a busy stretch of car washes, fast food and BBQ restaurants (“93 Years and still smokin’.”)
This was not the scenic route. At least not for me.
But for Dan, it held the shimmery memory effect of revisiting scenes from childhood. He pointed out where his brother cut through the trees during his paper route, where we could almost see a friend’s house through a fence, and where a train engineer actually picked him up and gave him a ride for a 1/2 mile or so one summer.
I expect our next walk will be a little more scenic in the traditional sense. But this one had its appeal. Walking through scenes from long ago—however changed or overgrown—connects our senses and our memories, and can enhance both.
I did a little more research about this.
on walking, memory, and creative thinking
In a 2014 study out of Stanford called “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking” researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz conducted experiments with college students. They determined that walking significantly boosts creative thinking when compared with thinking-while-sitting. In one test, they asked participants to generate novel uses for a common item, like a button. Walking helped generate more creative answers, like the button being used “as a doorknob for a dollhouse, an eye for a doll, a tiny strainer, to drop behind you to keep your path.” (This led me to wonder: did the idea for kids zooming around a miniature streetscape in Safety Town come to someone while walking?)
The researchers suggest this kind of “embodied cognition” could help us generate new thoughts because as our bodies move from one place to another, we are modeling how to move from one idea to another. They also speculate that walking may boost our “associative memory” or the way we each recall and generate new ideas out of the well of our own unique network of memories. Even a slow walk with a sniffy dog can do this.
All walking is good, but outdoor walking is best. The Stanford study authors refer to other studies indicating that “compared with an urban walk, a walk in nature restored people’s previously exhausted attentional capacities, resulting in improved performances at difficult tasks when no longer walking.”
I feel the truth of exhausted attentional capacity these days—do you? Staring at screens and filtering the daily barrage of information wears us down. If walking builds us back up, I’m all for closing the laptop or stowing the phone and stepping outside—it’s good for us. It’s good for our health, our brains, our creativity, and our souls.
Even as I look forward to our next walk being a little less urban and a little more green, I’m grateful for a walk down Dan’s memory lane, and where it led me on the page.
But mostly I’m grateful I got to see Safety Town…
a writing prompt
Take a walk—outside if you can. Pay attention to new ideas that arise.
When your walk is over, write about what you saw. What memories are stirred? What questions do you have? What are you thinking about or wondering now?
If you need a phrase to start, begin with: “On my walk, I wondered….”
bonus prompts inspired by Safety Town
Who taught you about safety as a child? Where were you able to wander as a child?
Were you obsessed with Richard Scarry’s Busytown book series like I was? I’ve just realized that Safety Town makes me think of Sergeant Murphy and Lowly Worm…
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I love this. Walking is therapeutic on so many levels. I walk my dog at least once daily, and while I normally listen to a podcast, I've been experimenting more with just walking and letting my mind wander. Several years ago when I was going through a depressed writer's block phase, my husband suggested I get out of the house and work from a coffee shop or something to change up the scenery. I was surprised by how dramatic the change was, just being out in my own neighborhood, being inspired by the brick on old houses and the arrangement of flowers in a neighbor's garden and a paper cup tap tap tapping down the street in a breeze. These were all like writing prompts that churned new ideas into words.
I learned safety in the age of "Mr. Yuck!" stickers and "Stop! Drop! and Roll!" I recently saw a meme online that said, "Stop, drop, and roll was such a big deal when I was a kid. I really expected to be on fire way more times than the zero times I have been so far." LOL
Even the walk where I tripped over a root (while looking at the bluest sky) took me on a journey--and part of it was the deep desire to walk outdoors along paths, in the woods among the trees, "awe" walks and ahh, walks. Thank you for sharing these wanderings and for encouraging us to pay attention to what's around us and in our hearts. Now to continue writing about the walk through my grandmother's house where every part of it has so many stories and so many cousins gathered to tour it with their own stories and observations. . .