A red light is a thirty-second meditation the city gave you for free.

There are a handful of forced pauses in a day, and most get filled the second they show up. A red light, a lift, a queue: each is a gap where nothing at all is required of you. Filled with a screen it vanishes. Left alone it is half a minute of your head not being pulled anywhere.

Use the next few stops for nothing. Breathe, look out the window, notice what your shoulders are doing. A few of those a day adds up in a way that is hard to believe until you have tried it for a week.