Featured essay
The case for walking without a destination
For most of my thirties I walked the way I did everything else: efficiently. A walk was the gap between two places where something was supposed to happen.
Then, in the winter my father was ill, I started walking without anywhere to go. The flat was too small for how I felt, and the streets were long enough.1
A route is a question you have already answered. Wandering is how you ask a new one.
A destination does a great deal of quiet editing. Take it away and the city gets louder, stranger, more generous. You notice the staircase you have passed a thousand times, and that it has a name.2
I don’t think aimlessness is a virtue on its own. But it is a practice, like keeping a notebook: a way of making room for things you didn’t know you were looking for.
The rules are few. Leave the phone in a pocket. Turn towards whatever is slightly uphill. When you reach something you recognise, go the other way.