A Long Walk with No Destination
For years I walked the same loop every evening: out past the allotments, along the canal, in through the gate with the broken latch, and home by the row of sycamores. It was a good walk and I could have drawn it blindfolded. It was also, I now think, a walk with all the thinking already done, and I had started to suspect that it was keeping me in the shape of my own thoughts instead of letting them move.
So this spring I began going out with no destination at all, which is much harder than it sounds. Without a route the mind has nothing to hold, and for the first ten minutes it complains. You turn left out of the door and it wants a reason. You pass a turning and it asks where the turning is going. The ordinary question, what do you actually want, arrives about four times a mile.
Then something loosens. A walk without a route is not a walk without attention; it is attention with the leash off. You notice which gate needs painting, that the hedge by the allotments has gone over into blackberry, that somebody is walking a greyhound and the dog is tired and the man is not.
A route, I have come to believe, is a promise to your future self that you will arrive somewhere, and a promise like that quietly puts an end to noticing. The route is the excuse. Without it there is nothing to prove, and what is left over is the walk itself: the weather on one side of the street, the way the light lies across the tarmac at four in the afternoon, the two people outside the cafe arguing cheerfully and both looking as though they are enjoying it.
That is what the wandering is for. Not inspiration, which is a promise no walk can keep. It is the removal of the small daily machinery by which we tell ourselves we are busy. An hour with no destination is an hour in which nobody needs anything from you, and I find that I come home with the day's sentences rearranged, as though the walk had quietly put them in a better order while my back was turned.