Cities are fabulous for walking. Sure, they can be loud. Yes, they can be chaotic. Cars honk and too-big trucks trundle and belch and beep. Things smash or are smashed. People get drunk, yell wildly at the moon. Construction machinery pounds concrete. Scaffolding is erected. And yet there is a life-affirming energy to walking the streets of a big city. Culture abounds! People abound! Cities worldwide are nexuses of creativity and imagination. A good city contains a dozen or more museums, each filled with more than could be understood in a single lifetime. This is the great seduction of city life: their density of culture, their insatiable hunger (as places) for more. More people, more creativity. Many of us are pulled to them like moths to a flame. We love walking them, being swaddled in all they have to offer, but sometimes … it’s a bit too much.

So we retreat. Not for good, just for a moment. We head to the countryside and walk in the mountains. We walk in the forest. We walk between rice paddies in Japan or between windmills in the Netherlands. We walk along the shore in Portugal and are made to feel small by the mighty Atlantic off to the side.

Animals skitter across dirt paths. Cows moo languidly. Birds sing their mellifluous birdsong in the canopy above. Our hearts rise in response to it all.

The countryside becomes an interlude, a softer beat taken between the harder beats of city life. If the city swells the brain with an overstimulation of inspiration, the countryside is like a pressure release.

Standing beside a lighthouse—the ragged coast spreading out in both directions, the sea expanding beyond—we feel our mind become uniquely quiet. To walk beside that lighthouse is to renew ourselves in a way only the countryside can provide. We process the city in the country. And then we return to walk beside the great chaos and commotion of the city, to once again be inspired, thinking fondly of the mountain or craggy coast that’s always there, always waiting for our return.