Jono Lineen: how walking makes us wiser

I've invited him to my favourite trail that twists and winds along O'Connor Ridge and he strides out, tall and lean. I hustle along after him, tape recorder in hand catching my every heavy breath in between questions.

What was I thinking? Here's a man who's completed a 2700km solo trek through the Himalayas, who was an international cross-country ski racer, a man who runs marathons.

If walking makes us wiser, I still have a lot to learn. But like any road to anywhere, it all starts with the first step.

In 1988, Lineen's younger brother Gareth died in a tragic rowing accident when storms tossed his university's eight into the freezing waters of Elk Lake in Canada. Gareth's body has never been found.

"I spent a couple of years after that fairly lost," Lineen says. "I had a dream from my childhood that started to wake me out of that grief, and it was about the Himalayas.

"I went there for one season, ended up staying for eight years and the culmination of that time was the 2700km solo trek I did through the Himalayas."

He wrote about this journey in Into the Heart of the Himalayas (MUP, 2014).

"I started the trek still really confused in a way, and dark psychologically, and by the end of that trek something had changed. I felt stronger psychologically, emotionally, as well as physically.," he says.

"After I finished the last book, the question was always still there: why, how, how did that happen, what were the processes. Was it the geography, the culture, the religion?

"Finally it dawned on me that the answer lay in the simplest part of the equation - walking. That was the defining activity of all that time in the Himalayas.

"The question was is there something about the simple act of walking that has that ability to transcend grief?"

He began to research the science of walking and discovered fascinating reasons for his metamorphosis.

But it all began somewhat simply.

"If we hadn't have stood up and started walking on two legs, nothing would have happened," he says.

"I find it really interesting that archaeologists talk about language and opposable thumbs, they talk about all this stuff that is, yes, intrinsic to human evolution but if we hadn't have got up and started walking and walking as a group none of that would have occurred."

Just think about it: the first time ardipithecus ramidus stood up and said to herself, what can I do with these things I'll calls hands?

But it's more than that, Lineen contends. He talks about how our bodies, our brains, adapted when we stood up, how when we start moving the neuro-electrical flow starts to change, how studies out of Stanford University measured how levels of creativity increased when subjects were walking, how there is a deep intrinsic connection between walking and the way we think.

We've reached the point on the trail where I usually turn around, but Lineen is keen to keep walking - "I could walk all day, Karen," he says, "and I could talk about this stuff all day too" - so we head off towards the base of Black Mountain.

Our pace has steadied and the conversation is so interesting I've forgotten about the pain in my legs. I'm keen to explore another aspect of his book, about how the idea of journey and movement is so prevalent in narrative.

We talk about all the phrases: thinking on my feet, one step at a time, one foot after the other, walking away from bad situations... We start to come up with a playlist: Walk on the Wild Side, Walk of Life, Walk the Line, Walk Away, You'll Never Walk Alone ... We talk about how some of our favourite non-fiction is about walking Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways: a journey on foot, Cheryl Strayed's Wild, Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods ... It may have got a little competitive.

"One of the mind-blowing aspects of the research in this book was why is it that the predominant narrative that we connect with is the journey narrative?" he says.

"People will say there are love stories, comedies and evil wizards and vampires but everything is still a journey.

"When you break it down any good story is about the continuum of change, it's about facing obstacles and overcoming those obstacles.

"That's the definition of a good life, putting yourself in situations and figuring out an answer, being able to apply that answer again and again."

He likes my trail, as the vista opens up across the city, but one of his favourite local walks is the Yankee Hat walk in Namadgi National Park. The easy six-kilometre trail winds its way up to the only currently known Aboriginal art sites in the ACT.

Carbon dating of the campsite deposits in the Yankee Hat rock shelter show Aboriginal people began using the shelter more than 800 years ago. Evidence from nearby sites suggests people were camping in the area, and presumably painting, as long as 3700 years ago.

"When you're moving through that landscape you're moving through that stratified history," he says, talking about the first peoples, the white settlers who later came to the area.

"We comprehend life at four kilometres an hour. When I'm walking in Yankee Hat I can sense that long, long, human habitation, even before you get to the rock paintings, then you see the old fences and you know settlers have been there for more than 100 years, the signs for the park and tyre tracks, there's this layered history there that becomes apparent when you walk."

Lineen, who works as a curator at the National Museum of Australia, was born in Belfast, Ireland, and moved to Canada as a young child. He met his Australian wife Trish in the Himalayas and they have two teenage sons, Liam and Connor.

Lineen remembers the first time his eldest son Liam stood up and walked.

"What is walking? When you trace it back to its evolutionary roots, getting up on two feet is related to creativity but it's also related to joy and security," he says.

"We all have a direct connection to those experiences through the fact that we all learned to walk.

"When we remember what our kids were like when they took those first steps, I remember Liam was just ecstatic. All of a sudden he had that joy of independent movement and he had security of knowing he could do it himself, he had that creative rush from thinking, okay this is something I knew I could do and I've done it, what can I do next."

Our walk is over, it's been more than an hour since we first set off. But both of us are ready for the next step.