Walking It Off

When work ended early today, I found myself walking the mile and a half to an afterschool pickup, rather than taking a bus or a train. Perhaps it was a conditioned response, as I normally walk home from work. Perhaps it was some sort of compensation for all the days I skip going to the gym. Perhaps I figured it wouldn't hurt, in an uncertain work world, to save the $2.50 bus fare. Or maybe, just maybe, I needed to "walk it off" in a way just not possible on public transportation.
 
As I walked in what I'd expected to be a lovely daylight savings time evening that was really a rainy almost spring night, I thought about my day. Free of work walls and family voices, I began to process things that had happened, interactions I'd had, things I might do. Instead of watching out a window for my train or bus stop, I was focusing inside, on things that have nowhere to be when there is only work and transportation and home. And when I arrived, still on time, for the pickup, I was not the same person who'd left work. Because in choosing to walk rather than train-it or bus-it, I had allowed myself a little mind transportation, the kind of transport that most of us need, but many of us never get.
 
I love that I live in a city of buses and trains that can take you just about anywhere. But sometimes, getting from A to B isn't about the vehicle that takes you. Sometimes it's about walking it off, so that when you get to B, you haven't just traveled from A to B, you can really be somewhere different when you get there.