Out the front door of our apartment, I flip off the light, close up, and use my key to swing the deadbolt. Before leaving the building I run inventory:

Computer bag? Check.

Lunchbox? Check.

To-go coffee mug? Check.

From there it’s down the long corridor, out the back door, dress shoes on concrete, wet grass, sidewalk and then the long stretch of asphalt. Looking at least one way before crossing the road, I make my way out into “it”, allowing the crisp air to mix with the caffeine on my tongue in an effort to wake myself up. Like a teabag, I begin the slow steep into the new day.

The morning commute, from apartment door to my cubicle desk, usually takes between 12-15 minutes. I don’t hurry; I don’t worry about the time. When I get to work I will start working and eight hours later (give or take) I will stop working, shut down my computer, pack my things up again and take a similar route back home.

Almost every time I make this Walk, I am thankful for each step of it. It’s predictably the same, but almost always different. Some days it is misty, drizzly cold; on other days the sun lies just on the verge of making an appearance. Lately the crunch of leaves adds to the backdrop of cars start-and-stopping at busy four-ways. On other days I am tethered to iPod.

There are few other wayfarers on this urban fjord, a mixed topography of residential, commercial, and industrial. Every morning, without fail, pigeons and ravens eye one another from parallel electric lines. The guys who work in glass are loading windows into flatbeds before I arrive, but the warehouse crew from the hardware store sit in their pickups smoking down nicotine while listening to sex jokes on sports radio. The mechanics seem as relaxed about time as health insurance hacks like me, but their black jumpsuits seem more manly, or maybe it’s the congealed grease on their hands, the carved wrinkles and cracked nails.

We are neutrons and electrons spinning around inside a atom, our trajectory may cross and collide, our occupational pursuits cause us to bump into one another but we just keep moving, heads nodding; no real mingling and no splitting.

The things I think about on this Walk are profound, endless, and mundane.

If I could find one, I’d hire a painter who could read my thoughts along the way and splash them across canvas in broad strokes. Like artistic dictation, I would feed him inspiration, on my walks; my imagination loping off in various directions where his colors could pursue. In hues, his paintings could pinpoint the edges of stories that must be pulled out, stretched into the middle of the frame, exhumed from within, and captured–right there in the waning light of day.

And having painted them, I would see where these walks lead and where they could go. Not back and forth forever, in an endless loop, a Celtic knot. But inward and outward in spiralling ripples of creativity and calm.

This Walk is a story, too. One that unfolds each day. I am the only reader, writer or editor of it. And to be honest, that singular, self-directed pleasure, well, on most days, it makes me quite satisfied. Even when my feet hurt.