It started as an accident. I left my earbuds on the kitchen counter, realized it three blocks later and decided not to go back. I had nowhere to be until dinner, so I simply kept walking, choosing streets by whichever one looked more interesting at each corner.
Without a podcast in my ears, the city got louder in the best way. Bicycle bells, a bus sighing at a stop, two old friends arguing cheerfully about baseball outside a deli, a saxophone practicing scales somewhere above a laundromat.
What I Started To Notice
I noticed doorways first. Painted blue doors, ornate iron gates, a florist’s shopfront with buckets of sunflowers spilling onto the sidewalk. Then I started noticing people: a woman in a black puffer coat and a red shoulder bag walking briskly ahead of me with the purpose of someone late for something important.
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I followed her direction without meaning to, down a tree-lined street lined with bicycles and parked cars, until she turned into a bakery and I kept going toward the river. The light was turning flat and silvery, the way it does in late afternoon when the clouds come in low.
My friend Elena Moretti, an urban planner in Boston, once told me she judges a neighborhood by how long she wants to stay on its sidewalks. “Good streets slow you down without you noticing,” she said. “They give you a reason to look up every thirty feet.” I thought about that a lot on this walk.
The Case For Wandering
There is a particular kind of thinking that only happens while walking. Problems I had been chewing on for a week loosened up somewhere around the second mile. I did not solve anything, exactly, but I stopped clenching around it.
By the time I turned back toward home, I had walked a little more than six miles and seen parts of my own city I had never visited, despite living here for nine years. My feet were tired and my mind was quieter than it had been in months.
I have since made it a monthly habit. No headphones, no route, no destination. Just a free afternoon, comfortable shoes and the willingness to turn left when it looks more interesting than right.
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