The long way home from the office

Somewhere in October I started taking the long way home. Not for exercise, exactly, though I'd have told you that if you'd asked at the time. The direct route is nineteen minutes; the long way is closer to an hour, cutting through a park and along a stretch of river I have no actual reason to walk past.

The honest reason I started doing it is that I noticed my evenings were arriving already used up. I'd get home at the same time I always had, but somehow with nothing left over — irritable in a way that had nothing to do with anything that happened that day, just a kind of residue from being at a desk since eight. The nineteen-minute walk wasn't doing anything to clear that residue. It was too short to be anything but a transition, and transitions that short don't actually transition you.

What the extra forty minutes are for

I don't listen to anything on the long walk, which took some getting used to. No podcast, no calls. The first few weeks I felt a low hum of impatience the whole way, the sense that I should be using the time for something. That feeling has mostly gone now, replaced by something closer to just being tired in a normal, walked-off way instead of a wound-up way.

I think what's actually happening is that an hour is roughly how long it takes me to stop rehearsing the day — the email I should have answered differently, the meeting that ran long for no reason. Nineteen minutes isn't enough time for that rehearsing to run its course; it just gets carried indoors and finishes itself out over dinner instead, which is a worse place for it.

It's a small, inefficient habit, and I don't think it would survive most people's schedules, including mine on plenty of days. But on the days it does, I notice the difference by around eight o'clock, in a way that's hard to attribute to anything else I did differently.