You can rush to a meeting. You can run to catch a bus, or run on a treadmill, or run after your dog. You can walk from your home to the pharmacy down the block and back. You can walk from the museum to the movie theater, taking 45 pleasant minutes to get there. You can meander through a street market, forgetting the passing of time. These are all activities involving some sort of locomotion on your two legs. They vary in speed, rhythm, and duration, and each creates a particular flow of psychic energy. You really don’t think and feel the same way when you rush to a meeting or when you meander around the neighborhood, although both are “bipedal locomotive activities,” to coin a term.

I live in Paris, and walking is a big part of my daily life. There’s the bakery and the pharmacy, of course, but also the movie theater and the museum, and also the Place des Vosges where I walk rounds, sometimes alone and sometimes with my wife, sometimes with my camera and sometimes carrying nothing. And when I travel, I walk as a tourist or informal explorer. Most recently I “walked Athens,” up and down the Acropolis, all around the historical neighborhoods, to my professional appointments and back to my AirBnB. Next up on my walking calendar are Strasbourg, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Minneapolis, and New York.

But right now I want to tell you about another bipedal locomotive activity: pacing. It’s totally different from rushing, running, walking, or meandering. I sometimes pace my own small apartment in Paris, and sometimes just the rug in my living room. I like working in cafés and hotel lobbies, and sometimes I pace the lobby. And sometimes I leave the café and pace up and down the block before resuming my work session.

Pacing has its own rhythm and speed, and also its geographical constraints. For me, a certain amount of “back and forth” is obligatory for proper pacing. I don’t pace an endless straight line, but I pace from this wall to that wall, and back, and again, or on a loop if I’m at a terrace or garden outside. The space doesn’t have to be tiny; I pace city blocks in Paris, but—you know, back and forth, back and forth. The “turning around” that a spatial constraint requires plays a role in how pacing affects my psychic energy.

Pacing allows me to think and feel. It invites introspection, reflection, some distance from displeasures and challenges. Trying to write a coherent paragraph and struggling with it, I leave the computer behind and I pace—for a few seconds, or for a minute or two or five. Sometimes while coaching a client face-to-face, I pace the room while the client is accomplishing a task or doing his or her own thinking-and-feeling.

Pacing organizes and releases psychic energy. Do you need to let go of something inside yourself? Go pace for a while. Do you need to digest an emotional event, or to slow down some inner agitation? Go pace. Do you need to feel your own animality in body, back, legs, feet, arms? Go pace. Do you need to figure out what has been distracting you all morning? Go pace. The distraction might dissipate, or you might suddenly realize what was causing it: an unremembered dream, or an obligation you’ve been avoiding without knowing that you were avoiding it.

Pacing, I sense the world and I sense myself in the world. Pacing, I come up with ideas and insights, solutions to problems, and sometimes problems to solutions. Yes, it’s very useful to figure out what kinds of problems may be solved from a solution that came to you while you were pacing. You don’t have to “create” a problem, you “locate” it instead. Believe it or not, the word “pace” comes from a Proto-Indo-European root (meaning a word from six thousand years ago) that means “to spread.” Although I often feel myself spreading psychically when pacing, I also use pacing to contain myself—that is, to gather my psychic energies, the better to structure them. Pacing is rooting, grounding, and spreading all at the same time.

More than ten years ago, I paced the Noguchi Museum in New York City for two hours. I had been having a busy and somewhat stressful time, and the museum visit marked the end of the busyness and the stress. It was a cold winter morning with clear blue skies, my favorite weather. Isamu Noguchi was a Japanese-American sculptor who, among other things, created marvelous stone rings, fountains, spirals, and gardens. His museum is located in his former atelier and studio, and it has the feel of a temple—to beauty, to craft, to timelessness in a modern setting. A dear friend accompanied me on this visit, and we found a rhythm that worked for both of us as we walked and talked, walked in silence, walked and absorbed the energies of the place. I felt—I really did feel!—that Noguchi himself was giving me a healing treatment, from the stone floor of his studio upward. At the end of two hours of steady pacing I was made new.

For fans of numbered lists (and I am such a fan myself), here it is.

Pacing is always walking, but walking isn’t always pacing.
It takes certain personality traits to enjoy pacing. It’d be a tragedy if pacing made you frustrated and murderous. Try it at home when there’s no one around. Then decide whether it’s safe to go pace an art gallery downtown.
If you need precise instructions before you pace, then you aren’t pacing: you’re marching.
Rhythm is important, plus some degree of spatial constraint that invites you or forces you to turn around.
I like the concept of psychic energy, which is different from physical, mental, or emotional energy. Unfortunately, it’d take too long to define it at this point.
Pacing isn’t goal-directed, but it can be very fruitful.
Barefoot on a sunny terrace when it’s not too hot; cotton socks caressing a smooth wooden floor; shoes that fit, footwear that you identify with. Comfort helps pacing, and it speeds up the release of psychic energy.