A Muddling Walk

Do you want to be in better health? Solvitur ambulando.

Are you feeling like you’re about to flip out due to your current social isolation? Solvitur ambulando.

Feeling stressed, depressed or anxious? Solvitur ambulando.

Need to work through a problem with a friend? Solvitur ambulando.

Are you spiritually dry? Solvitur ambulando.

Okay. Assuming you don’t read, speak or understand Latin, I’ll explain. Solvitur ambulando means “It is solved by walking around.” It’s recommended in a book called The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man. The lessons contained in the book, however, often apply to both genders, and the book was co-written by a man and a woman.

It says that many problems can be resolved or ameliorated by taking a walk. While acknowledging that walking can seem unexciting, so much so that the word for a person on foot — pedestrian — is also a synonym for ‘dull’ and ‘ordinary,’ the authors also tout walking’s beneficial effects on our bodies, minds and souls.

If you’re not a regular walker, right now is a great time to give it a try.  It’s one of the few things you can still get out and do.

In support of their pro-walking platform, the book’s authors quote numerous writers from the past who praised walking. Here’s one example, from Alfred Barron, writing in his Foot Notes, Or, Walking as a Fine Art:

“I walk chiefly to visit natural objects, but I sometimes go on foot to visit myself. It often happens when I am on an outward-bound excursion, that I also discover a good deal of my own thought….These [legs], when in motion, are so stimulating to thought and mind, they almost deserve to be called the reflective organs.”

Barron wrote that in 1875, but we can go back further than that. In the first century, the apostle Paul, in discussing the liberation of our human nature through Christ, wrote “For God has done what the law … could not do: by sending his own Son … to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but [walk] according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:3-4).

These verses are in the lead-up to the Epistle for today. And sure, Paul is using “walk” in a symbolic way, not in the literal sense the solvitur ambulando book does. Nonetheless, Paul’s use of “walk” does mean literally to “tread all around” or to “walk at large.”

For Paul then, walking means the whole round of the activities of the individual life lived in the Spirit. And he’s saying that walking in the Spirit is the way to the real life that is God’s gift. In other words, we solve the problems of life by living them while embracing what God is doing for us.

But many of the problems of life do not lend themselves to tidy solutions. Sometimes the solutions, such as they are, come only by muddling through the problems — hoc solvitur per muddling.  We are experiencing that in our day by day struggles right now.

“Muddling through” is usually defined as “to continue despite confusion and difficulties,” or as “to succeed despite being ill-equipped or untrained.” Well, doesn’t that describe the reality of much of what we face in life, especially today?

In fact, if we want a definition of what “normal” is, muddling through probably works about as well as anything. Perhaps when we were young, we naively believed that for most problems there were solutions “out there” somewhere, and that, if we let the right people know about our difficulties or got in touch with the right agency or hired the right life coach or read the right book or whatever, things would be fixed or solved.

But what has life taught us since? Yes, there are wise people; yes, there are helping agencies; yes, there is Siri and Alexa and Google. But in many circumstances, there’s only so much others can do.  We are living this out with the Coronavirus. So some of what remains is up to God and some is up to us.

And that often means muddling through — putting one foot in front of the other, somehow doing what needs to be done today. Muddling through, which is a way of walking, means dealing with what comes up, tackling the immediate stuff. Along the way, we may even have to back out of previous commitments and leave some other good things by the wayside. We generally have to start from whatever mess we find ourselves in and muddle our way out. That’s often exhausting, but, in fact, it’s frequently the only way, because much of the time there are no big, one-stroke solutions to life’s problems.

Part of the wisdom of some of the 12-step programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, is that they don’t focus on lifetime solutions; they talk about daily solutions — staying sober one day at a time, for example. That’s a muddling through sort of approach, but, remarkably, it is often the only way that works.

You’ll recognize that muddling through is the opposite of efficiency, and there are always people and seminars and books ready to tell us how to be more efficient. But the trouble is, the world itself seldom runs efficiently. We see that right now. What’s more, the situations in life that make it possible for us to do such things as ‘grow in the Spirit’ are seldom models of efficiency.

For example, one of the places where it’s possible for us to learn to care about others is the family, an institution that’s never been accused of efficiency. Writer Eugene Kennedy notes that one of the ways men and women grow is by falling in love, a process that “has never had high marks for efficiency.” Falling in love, says Kennedy, “preoccupies and drains a man of his energy, making him moon around during hours when he should be working; and yet it is still the best experience he knows, the experience that opens the magic of the world to him.” As for women, well, read Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Further, Kennedy says, “Christ lived an intensely human [read ‘inefficient’] life and he invites us to do the same. That’s the whole meaning of Incarnation. …” And he adds, “Maybe the Spirit can only touch us and change us when we drop the armor of efficiency and are able to let ourselves out with all the rough edges of life showing.”

Actually, it’s the framework in which we muddle that makes all the difference, and that’s the heart of Paul’s message.

– We can muddle through in the “flesh” — in the dread that life has no meaning or purpose and that, in the end, everything and everyone amounts to nothing.

– We can muddle through in the flesh — in the fear that some past misdeed, real or imagined, will haunt us for our lifetime.

– We can muddle through in the flesh — believing that we are alone and that it’s all up to us, and thus having little hope of resolving anything for the long term.

Or — OR — we can muddle through in the Spirit — looking at things as they really are, but with the assurance that sin and death do not have the last word.

Muddling in the Spirit means that as we face the problems of life, especially those that seem to defy solution, such as Covid-19, when all we have left to do is muddle through, we do not muddle through alone. We need to view our pains and losses and terrors and closed doors against the backdrop of what it means to walk in the Spirit — solvendum est per muddling per spiritum — and then carry on, clumsily if necessary, but in certainty that God flows even through our inefficiency, when our heart is tuned to him.