Walking
A walk with nowhere to be.
Not for steps, not for thinking, not to get anywhere. The old kind of walk, and how to take one on an ordinary evening.
There are walks for getting somewhere and walks for exercise, and both are fine. This is about the third kind, which used to be the only kind, and which most of us have not taken since we were about eleven.
A walk with nowhere to be. No destination, no route, no count of anything. Out of the door, and then whichever way the street goes.
Leave the reason at home
The hardest part is the door. Standing at it with your coat on and no reason to go. Every part of the modern mind wants a reason: a loop, a target, a podcast, an errand to attach it to. Leave all of that on the hook with the other coat.
Then go. Turn left, because you usually turn right. Walk at the speed of someone who is not late, which is slower than you think and takes a few minutes to find.
What to do with the eyes
Look at things that are near and then things that are far, and let the eyes move between them without a plan. A gate. The line of the hill. The way someone has stacked their bins. A window with a lamp on and a chair with a coat over it. None of this is material. You are not collecting anything. You are letting the street go past at walking pace, which is the pace it was built for.
The point of the walk is that it has no point, and this takes about twenty minutes to believe.
The twenty minutes
The first twenty minutes are not restful. The mind keeps producing reasons to turn back, and things it has just remembered, and the beginnings of lists. This is normal and it passes. Somewhere around the twentieth minute, without deciding to, you stop narrating. The walk stops being a thing you are doing and becomes a thing that is happening, with you in it.
This is the part people are trying to reach with the apps and the numbers, and it is here, free, at the end of a road with a hedge on it.
Weather
Go in weather. Not in storms, but in the ordinary grey that keeps most people in. Rain that is more of a mist. Wind that makes the trees say something. A walk in perfect weather is a walk in a photograph; a walk in the ordinary kind is a walk in the world, and the world is the thing you came out to be in.
- Wear the coat that is already by the door.
- Take nothing that lights up.
- Come back when your hands are cold or your feet decide.
Coming back
The door looks different from the outside after a walk like this. Smaller, and more yours. Inside, the room is where you left it: the cup on the sill, the lamp off, the chair with the coat on it that you did not take. Turn the lamp on. The evening is about to start, and you are already in it.
Tomorrow you will have somewhere to be. Tonight you had nowhere, and you went anyway.