The same walk for a year

Last October I started walking the same 2.4 kilometres every morning, from my front door to the canal bridge and back. It takes thirty one minutes if I do not stop, and I always stop.

I did it for 365 days, with four exceptions, two of them involving a fever. The route did not change. The point was to hold one thing still and see what moved.

What moved was me. In the first week I noticed almost nothing, because I was busy being pleased with myself for going out. By the second month I had stopped being pleased, and that is when the walk started to open up.

Here is what I noticed, roughly in the order I noticed it:

1. The bakery shutters go up at 6:50, not 7:00, which is why the smell reaches the corner before the lights do.
2. There is a loose paving stone outside number 31 that rocks when stepped on, and it has done so, I assume, for years.
3. The heron on the canal stands in a different spot depending on the wind, and it ignores me completely.
4. The light on the bridge moves about a hand’s width along the railing each week in autumn.
5. I stopped looking at my phone at around day 40, and did not decide to.

The last one is the one I think about. I never made a rule. The walk was just more interesting than the screen, in a quiet, unargued way.¹

1 The phone does come with me. It is in my pocket, on silent, and I take one photograph a month of the bridge. Twelve so far. They look almost identical, and I have decided that is the finding.

By spring I could tell the day of the week from the bin lorries alone. By summer I knew which neighbour was away. None of this is useful. All of it is mine.

I am still walking. On day 366 the paving stone was still loose, and I stepped on it on purpose.