The three miles I have walked four hundred times
There is a loop from my front door in Sheffield out along the canal, up through Norfolk Heritage Park and back down Duke Street. It takes fifty-two minutes at my usual pace and I have walked it, at a conservative estimate, four hundred times.
The first hundred were for exercise. The next hundred were for thinking, which is a polite way of saying I was worrying with better scenery. Somewhere after that it stopped being for anything, and that is when it got interesting.
What repetition gives you
A route you know by heart stops competing for your attention. You are not navigating, so you notice: the heron that stands on the same lock gate every October, the graffiti under the bridge that gets painted over each spring and returns by June, the exact week the hawthorn turns.
Novelty is loud. The same three miles, four hundred times, is how you learn to hear anything quieter than novelty.
I keep a pocket notebook for it now — not a journal, nothing so grand. Just a line a walk. Half of them are useless. The other half became the last two years of this newsletter.
Three lines from this month
- 3 Oct — The lock keeper’s cottage has a new door, painted the exact green of the old one. Someone cared about that.
- 7 Oct — Frost on the recreation ground before it was cold enough to notice on my hands.
- 11 Oct — Two people arguing about a bus timetable with genuine, sustained warmth. Married, I think, decades.
Next week: why I stopped reading three books at once, and what happened to how much I remembered.
Elsewhere