The walk home from a friend’s house on a summer night is a tiny adventure. Take the long way.

The walk home gets treated as the leftover part of an evening. It is also the only stretch of the night that belongs to nobody else, with the heat gone out of the air, the street quiet and nothing expected of you for twenty minutes. Small adventures do not announce themselves as adventures. Mostly they look like time you could have shortened and chose not to.

Take the long way back from somewhere this week. Add ten minutes on purpose and keep your headphones off for the last stretch. The aim is to notice that the trip was part of the evening rather than an interruption of it.