Recently, someone asked me about the Latin phrase that sometimes appears at the bottom of my emails: “solvitur ambulando.” As they noted, it was clearly a phrase with meaning to me, or else I would not use it: so what did it mean to me?
The phrase itself can be translated “it is solved by walking,” and was coined by St. Augustine (354–430 CE) as a way of suggesting that there are some issues that are better “solved by walking” than debating them ad nauseum. In this, he was inspired by an interaction between Greek philosophers nearly a thousand years prior. Zeno of Elea had proposed a series of arguments that have become known as “Zeno’s Paradoxes,” one of which seems to prove that all motion is an illusion. Another philosopher — the colorful Diogenes the Cynic (who would certainly have been a Will Campbell kind of Baptist had he been born in a different time and place) — stood up and left, saying as he went that he just proved that motion was real.
“Solvitur ambulando” is not quite “cutting the Gordian knot,” but both end up suggesting that simple solutions may exist to complex problems.
Perhaps because of the involvement of the eccentric Diogenes at the origin of this phrase, “solvitur ambulando” has shown up here and there in various pieces of literature. For instance, Lewis Carroll found it too nonsensically delicious to pass up, and published “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles” in 1895 in the philosophical journal Mind.
For me, it was the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin who struck a chord with his short 1825 work, “Motion” (rendered here in translation by Andrey Kneller):
One bearded sage concluded: there’s no motion.
Without a word, another walked before him.
He couldn’t answer better; all adored him
And all agreed that he disproved that notion.
But one can see it all in a different light,
For me, another funny thought comes into play:
We watch the sun move all throughout the day
And yet the stubborn Galileo had it right.
You see, “solvitur ambulando” reminds me that not only is the best way to get a solution sometimes to get moving. It reminds me that sometimes no solution can be found unless we gain the multiple perspectives that come from moving through space and time, and through nature itself. The sun moves, yes; and the earth does too; both things can be true! But we will not know this without a willingness to unseat ourselves from our comfort zones of certainty and journey somewhere unknown where we are sure to discover incomprehensible paradoxes that prove to be nothing more than simple truths uniting us all.
What does “solvitur ambulando” mean to me? It means if we feel stuck, we probably need to move our bodies and find each other so we can hear and see something we are missing.
Anyway, I’m in your corner. We’re all in this together.
Pastor Michael