The Walk That Ends the Day

The walk has no destination. This is its only rule, and it is the whole thing.

I leave the house at the hour when the day is deciding to end but has not fully committed. The light is going. The streetlights are in that undecided state, some on, some not, a few flickering as if clearing their throats. I go out into this and I walk, and I do not go anywhere, because going somewhere would give the walk a point, and the point is that there is no point.

Against the errand

We have made walking into an errand. We walk to the shop, to the station, to the meeting, to the car. The walk is always toward something and the something is always the real event and the walk is just the friction between us and it. Even the walk we take for exercise has a target, a number, a loop to close.

This walk is a refusal of all that. It goes out the door and turns whichever way feels right and follows no plan. Some evenings it is ten minutes. Some evenings it is an hour and I could not tell you where the time went, which is the point, the time is not meant to be accounted for.

A walk toward nothing is the only walk that lets you notice everything.

What you see when you're not going anywhere

Without a destination the eyes change what they do. They stop scanning for the way and start simply seeing. The particular blue the sky goes just before dark. A lit window and the warm domestic life inside it, someone at a stove, a lamp, a life that is not yours and never will be and is beautiful precisely because of that. A cat performing its serious evening business along a wall.

You hear more too. The day's sounds are winding down and the evening's are winding up, and there is a changing of the guard in there, the traffic thinning, a television murmuring through an open window, the particular hush of a neighborhood settling into its night. You are walking through the seam of the day, the place where one thing becomes another, and you can only really feel that seam if you are not hurrying across it.

The turning back

There is always a moment when the walk turns back, and it is never planned, it announces itself. The body knows. Something in you has been emptied out and refilled, quietly, without your supervision, and it is time to go home.

The walk back is different from the walk out, though it covers the same streets. The streetlights have made up their minds now. The dark has arrived properly. The lit windows are more of them and warmer. And the house, when it comes into view, is just a house, but it is the one that is mine, and I have returned to it the long way, having discharged the day into the dusk with each unhurried step.

I go in. I did not accomplish anything. I walked toward nothing and arrived exactly there, and the day, which had been holding on too tight, has finally, fully, let go.