The Long Way Home

There is a route from the station to my house that takes eleven minutes. I know it well enough to walk it without looking up. I take it when it is raining, when I am late, when the day has been long and the house is the only thing I want.

And then there is the other route, which takes forty minutes and goes nowhere in particular. It passes the allotments, the small church with the locked gate, the row of houses that always seem to be painting something. It ends at the same door. It is not efficient. It is the route I remember.

The purpose of no purpose

We are trained to walk with a destination. A walk is exercise, or a commute, or a way to get from one useful place to another. The step counter agrees. The map app agrees. The body, which is the only thing actually doing the walking, is not consulted.

A purposeless walk is a different animal. It has no goal, so it cannot fail. It can be interrupted by a cat, a window, a smell of bread. It can change its mind at the corner. The mind, released from the task of arriving, begins to wander in the way it was designed to wander — sideways, associatively, toward the thing you were not looking for.

The best thoughts arrive at walking pace, and they rarely arrive on the shortest route.

What the body remembers

I grew up in a town where the shortest route was always through someone’s garden. You learned the gaps in the hedges, the gates that were never locked, the places where the pavement gave way to mud. The map in my head was not a map of streets. It was a map of permissions.

Walking the long way keeps that old map alive. It reminds me that a place is not a set of coordinates but a set of relationships, most of them invisible to anyone in a hurry. The woman at number twelve has a dog that will not be hurried. The church gate is locked, but the bench outside is not. The allotments smell of wet earth and, in June, of strawberries that belong to other people.

None of this is information you can use. It is information you can live in.

Arriving late

The long way home means arriving later than you needed to. This is, by the standards of the day, a small failure. There was a shorter route. You chose the longer one. Some part of you should be ashamed.

But the house is the same house when you get there. The kettle boils in the same time. The evening opens in the same way. The only difference is what you brought through the door with you: a head full of weather, a sentence half-formed, the name of a tree you finally learned.

I am not recommending that you always take the long way. There are days when eleven minutes is the right number. But I am recommending that you know where the other route goes, and that you take it often enough to remember that arrival is not the only thing a walk is for.

The rain starts just after the allotments. I do not mind. I am almost home.