The small evening walk

After dinner most evenings, around eight or eight-thirty, my partner and I take a small walk. The walk is short — about twenty minutes, sometimes less — and follows the same route through the residential streets near the apartment. We have done this for perhaps three years now. The walk has become one of the small reliable structures of our evenings, and the cumulative effect of three years of small evening walks has been, in some quiet way, one of the most restorative practices I keep.

What the walk is like

Slow. The pace is meaningfully slower than a normal walking pace — closer to a stroll than a walk. We are not going anywhere. The route is chosen for its small variety of side streets and small variations of view, not for any destination. Most evenings we walk in silence for the first ten minutes or so, and then talk quietly for the second half, about whatever happens to come up.

The route passes a small park, a few small shops that are mostly closed at this hour, a stretch of older houses with small front gardens, and back home along a different street. The walk is the same walk most evenings. The small variation comes from the season, the light, the weather, the small things that happen to be different on any given evening.

What the walk does that the rest of the evening does not

Provides a small physical transition between the activity of the day and the rest of the evening. The body, after dinner, has been mostly seated for the previous several hours. The digestion is in progress. The energy is starting to settle into the evening's lower register. A short slow walk activates the body just enough to support the digestion, without raising the energy back up to a level that would interfere with the slow descent toward sleep.

It also provides a small natural light input — usually some twilight, or the small ambient light of the city in early evening — that is, in winter especially, the only outdoor light we get all day. The exposure is brief but matters for the circadian rhythm. The body, having had a small outdoor light input in the early evening, sleeps better than it would have without.

On the conversation that happens

The walk, after the first ten minutes of silence, has become one of the main times we talk about whatever needs to be talked about. The walk is the right setting for these conversations in ways that I did not initially appreciate. The slow pace, the side-by-side rather than face-to-face arrangement, the small absence of the small visual distractions of an indoor environment — all of these create a small specific quality that supports the kind of unhurried talking that does not happen well at a kitchen table.

Many of the small important conversations of the last three years have happened on these walks. Decisions about household things, small concerns about family members, the slow unfolding of plans for the future, the small shared reflection on whatever has been preoccupying either of us — all of these have come up on the walks more reliably than they have come up anywhere else.

On the small mechanics of making this happen

It helps that we have, more or less, committed to the walk as a daily ritual. There is no negotiation about whether to walk on any given evening. The walk is the default. The walk happens unless something specifically prevents it. This removes the small daily friction that would, if left to small daily decisions, cause the walk to fade.

It also helps that the walk is short. Twenty minutes is achievable on almost any evening. A forty-minute walk would, on tired evenings, often be skipped. The twenty-minute walk happens. The cumulative effect, over years of small twenty-minute walks, is greater than the cumulative effect of occasional longer walks would have been.

What this has done

Quietly become one of the most reliable parts of our shared life. The walks have, over three years, accumulated into a small archive of evenings — different lights, different weather, different conversations, different small moments noticed and shared. The accumulation is part of the relationship now, and the small practice of walking together has, in some specific way, become part of the way we love each other.

There is no large lesson here. The lesson is small. Do the small things consistently and they will, over years, become something larger than they look like in any given evening. The twenty-minute walk is, in any specific evening, just a walk. The three-year-accumulated walk, the one that has happened a thousand times now, is one of the small structural supports of our shared life, and the small structural supports are, in the end, what hold the larger life together.