The Long Way Round: Notes on Walking

I have been taking the long way home for most of my adult life. This began as a practical habit — I lived, at various points, in cities where the shortest route was never the best one, where "shortest" and "fastest" diverged significantly and the fastest route involved a road I preferred to avoid — and it has since become, I think, something closer to a philosophy, though I distrust that word and would settle for disposition.

Walking, specifically, and specifically the long way. I want to try to explain what I mean and what I think it has given me.

The most common objection to the long way is time. The long way takes more time. If you have limited time, this is a genuine cost. I don't dismiss it. But I want to press, gently, on the premise. The question is not only whether you can afford the extra time. The question is also what you are doing with the time saved by the short way. In my experience, time saved by efficiency is rarely experienced as time. It is experienced as a slightly faster transition from one obligation to another. You arrive at your destination and you have, effectively, not been anywhere.

The long way is slower, and in being slower, it is also something else. It is present. You are in it rather than passing through it. This seems simple but I have come to think it is the whole thing.

Let me try to describe what I mean by the long way home specifically.

The city I live in now has a particular geography — a ridge running east to west, a river to the south, pockets of park that the nineteenth century left in the gaps between roads. The short way home cuts through the busiest part, moving efficiently through the commercial district, crossing at the lights, proceeding along the main road. It takes eleven minutes. I have timed it.

The long way takes forty-five. It goes down to the river, across the footbridge where someone has been maintaining a small planting of herbs in a gutter crack for years now — I have watched them through three winters and two heatwaves, and they endure, and I have come to feel for them something between admiration and affection. It follows the river east for several hundred metres, past the boathouses where an elderly man in green waders is sometimes tending something that requires tending, past the bench where two pigeons appear to have established a permanent residence, past the point where the path narrows and you have to watch your step because the paving is uneven.

From there it rises, steeply in the middle, into the old part, where the streets are narrower and the buildings remember other centuries. There is a baker here whose loaves come out in the late afternoon, and the smell reaches the street, and this is one of the fixed pleasures of the route — reliable, seasonal in its variations (the smell is different in winter, denser, more bread-forward; in summer it's cut with something floral from the herb garden next door), a sensory landmark as reliable as any geographical one.

Then down again, through the small square with the iron fountain that hasn't worked in years but that someone keeps clean, past the second-hand bookshop that closes at five and whose window I always check anyway (once I found a first edition of something extraordinary, sitting there uncatalogued, which I am still not fully over), and then up my street, past the neighbours' garden, which is either a work of deliberate wildness or benign neglect and which I have never resolved, and which I am content to leave unresolved.

Forty-five minutes. I take it three or four times a week, weather permitting, and on the days I take it I arrive home in a different state than on the days I don't.

The state is hard to name precisely. It is not happiness, exactly, or not only that. It is more like having been returned to myself. The walk performs, I think, a kind of defragmentation of attention — scattered during the day across the dozen simultaneous demands of a connected working life, it reassembles into something more coherent, more directed, more mine.

There is a body of research on this that I have read with interest and largely agree with: walking has measurable effects on mood, on cognitive function, on creativity. The default mode network, which is associated with creativity and self-referential thought, is more active during walking than during sedentary work. We think differently when we move. Our problems, held at desk-height, look different when they are carried at walking pace through the world.

But I want to say something about the long way specifically, rather than walking in general, because I think the route matters and the pace matters and the familiarity matters in ways that the research doesn't always capture.

Familiarity is important. I could walk a different long way every evening. In a city of this size, I could take a different route for years without repetition, and there is a version of this approach that seems attractive — the urban flaneur, the perpetual discoverer, the person who never takes the same street twice. But I have tried this, and it produces something different from what I am looking for. It produces the pleasure of novelty, which is real, but it does not produce the pleasure of recognition, which is also real and which I have come to value more.

The familiar route allows you to notice change. You see the herb garden in the gutter crack through the seasons. You see the boathouse man's green waders through the years. You are present at changes that happen too slowly to notice in a single visit: the gradual lean of an old wall, the advance of ivy, the fluctuating tideline of litter on the narrow path. The familiar route makes you a kind of informal archivist of the ordinary. You carry a record of how things were, and you register how they have become, and in this way the route is always both the same and different, which is also, I would argue, true of a life.

The long way also teaches patience in a form I have not found elsewhere. You cannot hurry it without losing it — the moment you walk the long way at the pace of the short way, it becomes indistinguishable from the short way except in duration. The point is the pace. The point is the willing submission to a speed at which things can be noticed.

We live in a culture that is constitutionally suspicious of this submission. Speed is associated with ambition, and slowness with failure. To take the long way is to be, in the eyes of a certain worldview, inefficient. But efficiency, as a value, is meaningless in the absence of a goal. Efficient toward what? Faster in service of what end? If the end is to live well, and if living well includes being present in the world rather than transiting it, then the long way is not inefficient. It is, in fact, the most direct route available.

I am aware that this argument has a class dimension and I don't want to sidestep it. The long way home presupposes that you have a home to return to, that the forty-five minutes are yours to dispose of, that you are not working two jobs and collecting children from three locations on a schedule that permits no detours. I know that this is not everyone's situation. I count it among my privileges that it is, often, mine.

But I want to make the argument not for the specific walk but for the principle — for whatever version of the long way is available to you, in whatever form the detour takes. The coffee taken sitting down rather than carried. The route home that passes the water rather than the road. The conversation extended past its natural endpoint because something interesting is happening. These are not luxuries in the pejorative sense. They are the substance of a life examined.

The herbs in the gutter crack are in flower at this time of year. I don't know what they are. I have never asked. Every time I pass, I think that I should find out, and every time I arrive home I have thought of something else, and the name of the herb remains unknown to me, and the herb remains there, flowering anyway.

There is something in this that I find instructive, though I have not yet finished working out what.There is a related argument that I should make, which concerns attention more broadly. The long way home is, I have been suggesting, a practice of attention — of paying attention to a familiar route, of finding in the familiar the continually novel. But I want to extend this to a more general claim: that the quality of attention you bring to ordinary life is the most significant factor in how that life is experienced.

This is, I recognise, a claim that has been made many times by many people in many traditions, from the Stoics to the Romantics to the contemporary mindfulness movement, which has commodified the insight with characteristic efficiency. I don't mean to recover the insight in its commodified form. I mean something quieter and less prescriptive than a practice.

What I mean is this: the world contains more than any of us will ever notice. This is not a depressing statement. It is, I think, the most hopeful thing I know. It means that no matter how long you have lived somewhere, how familiar the daily route, how well-known the faces you pass — there is always more available to attention than you have yet taken in. The familiar street contains depths that decades of walking have not exhausted. The person you have known for years continues to surprise.

The herbs in the gutter crack have been flowering all this time without my knowing their name. This is embarrassing, perhaps. But it is also, in a minor way, wonderful. There is still something there to learn. The route is not exhausted. It will not be, as long as I am paying attention.

Walking the long way is one way of paying attention. There are others. Reading slowly. Eating without a screen. Having a conversation without an agenda. The forms of attention share a quality: they require the suspension of forward momentum, the willingness to be in a moment rather than moving through it toward the next one.

I think about this most in the autumn, when the route changes character. The light is lower and differently angled, and everything it touches is briefly made strange — familiar surfaces seen at unfamiliar angles, the ordinary made momentarily extraordinary. This is what attention does. It makes the ordinary strange in the good way, the way that reveals depth rather than defamiliarising it. The street is still the street. But seen with attention, it is more itself than it is when you move through it too quickly to notice.

I am still taking the long way home. The herbs are in flower. The old man in the green waders has not appeared this autumn, and I am keeping an eye out for him with a concern I find I cannot entirely account for. He is probably fine. He is probably simply elsewhere. But I notice his absence, which means his presence had been registered, which means the route had been doing its work.

This is all I mean by the long way. Not a system. Not a practice, in the managed sense. Just the decision, repeated, to be somewhere on the way to somewhere else.

One final thing, which I almost forgot to include.

There is a moment on the long way home -- it occurs somewhere on the river path, usually -- when the city noise drops below a threshold and the water sound becomes the dominant one, and the shift in the sonic register produces, reliably, a corresponding shift in my interior state. Something loosens. Something that had been held at a slight, unconscious tension releases.

I have come to think of this moment as the actual beginning of the evening. Not when I leave the office. Not when I start walking. The moment on the river path when the water is louder than the road. Everything after that feels like mine.

The herbs are still there. The boathouse man came back last week. The bookshop window has a new display that I have not yet had time to read properly. Tomorrow I will take the long way home, and I will read it then.