Recently the New York Times published an article titled “The Beauty of the Silent Walk,” about an emerging wellness trend among TikTok influencers.

I was excited to read it, because I assumed this group of young people (and now the NYT readership) had just discovered a practice I thought I invented, called the “wordless walk.” I don’t think I’ve written about it here, but I have described it in some of my books and courses.

To take a wordless walk, you go for a walk with the intention of staying attentive to the environment around you, particularly how it sounds. Whenever you notice you’re talking in your head, about anything, you drop the talk and go back to listening and looking. You can talk in your head later; the walk is just for noticing.

This practice teaches you that you don’t need to address every instance of mental talk you have. In fact, your thoughts will never leave you alone if you try to resolve every train of thought that arises. Instead, you can just enjoy the world as it reveals itself before you.

The wordless walk is never really wordless in practice. Thoughts still get a hold of you, but simply practicing the intention to defer to noticing over thinking can make a huge difference to your mental state, and your relationship with thinking in general.

To my disappointment, this is not what the TikTokkers were doing. By “silent walk,” they just meant walking without listening to headphones. “No airpods, no podcasts, no music,” one influencer put it. “Just me, myself, and I” she said, tapping her forehead for emphasis. By the sounds of it, the “silent walk” movement is essentially Gen Z’s discovery of inner monologue as an alternative to constant electronic entertainment. That’s definitely an improvement, but there was no mention of possibly experiencing the kind of silence that lies outside of thought and words.

The NYT comment section, which seems to be mostly people over 50, was even less charitable. The top comment: “I take ‘silent walks’ every day. I call them ‘walks.’”

I became more sympathetic towards this movement when I reflected on how entertainment-addled my own life has become in recent years. I do use headphones more often, even at home — why not consume an audiobook while working out, or learn about history while folding bedsheets? I’m certainly more dependent on my devices than I was even in 2019. If “content creep” is this much of a problem for me, a late-Gen-X baby who graduated high school before the internet was much more than a novelty, then members of younger generations must be really entangled with device-based entertainment — so much so that walking down the street without absorbing content could seem like a new and radical idea.

In 2020, the satirical newspaper The Onion published an article titled, “Man Somehow Able to Muster Strength to Fold Laundry Without Listening to Podcast.” This made me laugh at the time, evidently because I had already succumbed to the habit of adding entertainment to menial household work. If I had read that headline even a few years earlier, I wouldn’t have understood the joke.

The point at which such a habit becomes a need isn’t immediately clear. For the silent walk people, however common they are among their generation, audio accompaniment on walks seems to have crossed into an assumed necessity. Mady Maio, one of the influencers mentioned in the article, said that the first two minutes of her silent walks were “mental mayhem” at first, with anxiety shooting up and the mind going into overdrive. After that, she says the mental activity calms a bit, brain fog dissipates and new ideas have space to enter the mind.

It’s good that the mind can readjust like that. Perhaps our minds aren’t permanently warped by too much input and stimulation, just very used to it at the moment.

As silly as they seemed at first, these silent walk people are voluntarily challenging themselves to break from a long-accustomed comfort. It’s awkward at first, like any new absence, but then mind adapts, and by the sounds of it they’ve discovered something more rewarding than constant stimulation, which is great.

I wonder a lot about the minds of people who lived a hundred or a thousand years ago, and how different their inner experience was. They certainly weren’t listening to podcasts all the time, and I suspect they also weren’t nearly as lost in thought as we are. There were fewer inputs and fewer demands on their attention. They weren’t trying to process nearly as many ideas and events and opinions as we do in the internet age. They took in far less content, to use a 21st-century word, and I imagine that difference made the average mind much more spacious and available to its surroundings.

How to Take a Wordless Walk

You probably aren’t someone for whom walking without headphones is a radical act, so doing that wouldn’t change much about your state of mind. The wordless walk, however, for most people, will be a fairly radical exercise. You’re experimenting with tuning out the “inner headphones” of mental monologue, a more pervasive source of diversion and stimulation than any electronic headphones.

This is how you do it. Go for a short walk with the intention of noticing stuff rather than thinking about stuff. As you walk, let the sounds and sights of your surroundings fill your attention. This time is for looking and listening; you can think all you want later.

Thought will still happen. The mind will generate comments and associations, and you don’t need to stop it or try to get rid of it. Just don’t attend to it. Instead, leave the thought unanswered and listen for the next obvious sound to emerge. (The soundscape is a great place to return to, because there’s always another sound about to make itself known, as soon as you’re listening again.)

Be interested in how things look and sound. A good way to frame this practice is that you’re looking at and listening to the world as though it’s saying something to you. There’s no need to interpret or analyze what’s being said. Just let it express itself to you for once. When you notice you’re focusing again on mental talk, go back to listening and looking.

The mind’s blather will keep trying to get your attention back, just as the headphone-addicted zoomer will habitually reach for her phone. That’s okay. Getting caught up in mental talk will happen, and shouldn’t be regarded as a mistake or problem. Just take it as a reminder to let the world talk again. You’ve spent your whole life talking. Dedicate this little bit of time to finding out what the world has to tell you and show you. Treat this as a matter of courtesy and deference, like the world is a wise, soft-spoken old man who is never going to talk over you.

Doing this regularly makes the mind aware, even at other times, that it can shut up in the middle of one of its speeches and just start noticing again, and nothing of value is lost.

Aside from that I don’t want to tell you what’s going to happen, because you should go and find out. One thing you might notice, though, is that the world is a lot less repetitive than the mind. The mind goes on about the same stuff forever. The world always has something new to say. It just doesn’t use words.

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Photos by Volkan Olmez, David Tenniers II, Sarah Brown, Muhmed Alaa El-Bank, and Sergei Dolcet Escrig