Walking Home Slowly

I used to take the quick road home.

Down the main street, across at the lights, past the shuttered shop, and through my own front door in twelve minutes. It was a fine road. It got me there.

Then one evening in September I turned left at the corner without deciding to, and I have not gone back.

The long way

The long way adds fifteen minutes. That is all. Fifteen minutes is not much time to lose, and I have not missed it once.

It begins at the lane behind the bakery, where the back doors open onto stacked crates and the smell of yesterday's bread. Then the allotments, a long row of small plots each with its own character. A scarecrow wearing a man's old jacket. A water butt painted green. A bean frame lashed with string, dry now, rattling in the wind.

Beyond the allotments there is a low stone wall that has been falling down, slowly, for as long as I have lived here. One section has collapsed entirely. Someone has stacked the fallen stones in a neat pile at its foot, and I have never found out who.

Autumn, noticed

You see things on foot that the road hides. The first yellow leaf on the hawthorn. A line of spiders' webs strung along the fence, silver with the evening damp. The light going orange and then blue, and a single lit window far up the hill that looks like a held breath.

I try not to name everything. A name can close the eye. I look, and then I let it go.

Sometimes there is a robin on the wall. It does not move as I approach. It watches me with an expression I choose to read as tolerance.

What changes

My pace slows by the second corner. My shoulders drop, though I did not know they were up. The long list I carry from the day starts to come apart, and what remains is smaller and simpler.

By the time I reach my own gate, I am a different person from the one who left the studio. Not a better one, necessarily. A quieter one.

A small recommendation

• Take the road you do not usually take

• Leave your phone in your pocket

• Walk as if you had nowhere to be

• Stop when something asks you to

That is the whole method. It costs nothing, and it needs no equipment but shoes.

At the gate

There is a moment, just before I turn the key, when I stand with my hand on the cold iron and look back down the lane. The light has almost gone. The wall is a grey line. The allotments are dark shapes.

Then I go in, and the kettle goes on. The evening has already begun, and I have been in it for quite some time.