Every walk I take now has a purpose, which is how I know something has gone wrong. I walk to the store, to the meeting, to close the rings on a watch that has opinions about my circulation. Somewhere in the last decade, walking stopped being a way of being in the world and became a way of getting through it.
The walk without a destination is a different instrument entirely. It has no failure state. You cannot be late to nowhere. You cannot take a wrong turn when every turn is the itinerary. For an hour, the part of the mind that optimizes — that restless, counting part — has nothing to do, and it finally, mercifully, goes quiet.
✦ What the aimless walk is for
Nothing, officially. That is its power. But I have noticed that the problems I carry out the door on an aimless walk rarely come home in the same shape. Thought moves at three miles an hour. The tangled thing loosens somewhere between the second bridge and the street with the plane trees, not because I worked on it but because I finally stopped.
"You cannot be late to nowhere. You cannot take a wrong turn when every turn is the itinerary."
The Situationists called it the dérive — the drift — and dressed it up in theory, but every child already knows the technique. Children walk the way water moves, pulled by whatever glitters. It takes years of training to walk like an adult, eyes forward, route optimal, and the training can be undone in a single afternoon if you let it.
✦ A modest practice
Once a week, leave the house with no destination and no phone, and turn whichever way the light looks better. Walk until you are slightly lost, which in most neighborhoods takes twenty minutes and in most lives takes considerably longer. Then find your way back slowly.
You will not be more productive afterward. You may, briefly, remember that you were never meant to be.