How To Have a Thought

5 days ago
2 min read

A Walk with Charles Darwin

A TRUE TALE WITH

A CHERRY ON TOP

A book cover shows a person with a hat and stick walking a dog in a forest. Title: How to Have a Thought. Colors: green, brown.

Neal Porter Books

(Holiday House Publishing)

(pub. 1.13.2026)

32 pages

Ages 4 - 8

Author: Nicholas Day

Illustrator: Hadley Hooper

Character: Wilma Dykeman

Overview:

" How do you work through a complicated idea, solve a tricky problem, or make a big discovery? Charles Darwin had a lot of ways to do it. He paced in circles and hit rocks with a stick. He studied the bones of his dinner. He even rode around the world on a boat called The Beagle.

These methods may sound unorthodox, but they led him to some pretty great thoughts—and discoveries about the origins of life as we know it."

Tantalizing taste:

"On these walks, Charles Darwin’s mind roamed.

That’s what the mind does on a walk. It finds its way around the normal routes. It finds it way past the usual barriers.

It finds its way to the hard thoughts.

When Darwin had a problem he measured it in terms of walking. Ordinary problems were one-rock problems. More difficult problems were two-rocks, three-rocks, even four-rocks.

And then there was the problem it took years of walking to solve...

Darwin walked his way to the idea of natural selection."

And something more: Nicholas Day writes at the end of the book: "I've just come back from a walk myself. It was not an extraordinary walk... And then I thought about coming home and writing these sentences, not because they are extraordinary, but because they are ordinary artifacts of an ordinary walk... Like Charles Darwin, we end up somewhere different from where we began. Like Charles Darwin, we end up somewhere no one else has ever been."