Nightwalk
I spend a lot of time wandering around.
Walking is important enough to the design process that they taught us about it in design school. The formula is to think really hard about a problem—they'd force me to complete a minimum number of sketches and mind maps of concepts—and then to forget about it and go for a walk. Taking a shower also works, or sleeping. But walking is especially good because it adds a bit of noise: random sights and sounds and smells to keep the conscious mind occupied. The problem drifts from the foreground of your awareness into the subtle background. It moves through your digestive system, idly flipped this way and that. The associations, made explicit by the mind mapping, expand outward to further bubbles. Eventually, out of the haze, a brilliant answer suddenly pops into your mind.
All of the times in my life when I've felt the most alone and aimless were surrounded by a constant background of walking, sometimes as much as 15,000 steps a day. I listen to music while I walk, mostly a single song or small set of songs on a loop. Without the generative step preceding it, the walk has nothing left to chew on but yourself.
I don't drive, so my home is the center of all the walking I do. I end up seeing the same places over and over. I end up with a strong mental map of the neighbourhood. Thoughts become pinned to places, as if the world were an enormous idea palace. Visiting old neighbourhoods feels strange because the houses are haunted with the versions of myself that came before.
Forgetting is the ultimate sorting mechanism.
A few years ago I tried to start a podcast called Nightwalk, where I’d take a friend on a walk at night with a field recorder. The idea was that the listener could join us on a walk of their own. I did one test episode during the day at 11AM and it turned out exactly as I pictured it, but the three I recorded in the night were shockingly unlistenable. It was like listening to someone try to describe a dream from inside the dream itself. The conversations would start fine, then devolve into nonsense and giggling almost as soon as the sun went down. Everyone is stupid in the dark, but nobody notices because they're stupid too.
I often try to capture the quality of walking in my writing. The dreamlike slide of one unrelated idea into the next, like houses you walk by in passing. You can stop to take a longer look at a nice view of the sun setting over a lake. Sometimes a beautiful view is almost painful to look at, demanding more reverence than you have to give. Time wants to stand still, but the clock continues to tick forward. Eventually the light is gone.
No matter how far you travel, at some point it's time to turn back and come home.