There is a walk I take where I …

There is a walk I take where I stop knowing, somewhere past the second field, whether I chose the route or the route chose me. My feet just kept turning left. And for a while I told myself a story about wanting the long way round, the light on the hedgerows, all of that — when the honest version is I wasn’t deciding anything. I was being carried, and narrating it afterwards as though I’d held the wheel.

That’s the thing I keep circling. Not wandering itself. Wandering is fine. I’m a great believer in the long way round. The problem is the pretending — the little voice behind my eyes that dresses up a current as a decision, so I never have to feel how much of my day just happens to me.

Because there are two kinds of not-knowing-where-you’re-going, and they feel almost identical from the inside, which is what makes it slippery.

One is being moved by something you haven’t noticed — an old habit, a mood you didn’t catch, someone else’s pull on you — while telling yourself a tidy story about why. You mistake the current for your own swimming. You end up somewhere and can’t honestly say how, only that you have a nice explanation ready.

The other is feeling the pull, naming it, and going anyway. Curious. Boots off. You still don’t know where it leads. But it’s yours.

Same footpath. Completely different animal.

What I don’t trust is the idea that the fix is more self-knowledge, more explaining. I’ve met the version of me that can name every pattern — this is my avoidance, this is the father thing, this is the one where I go quiet — and names them so fluently that the naming quietly replaces the changing. A very sophisticated way of keeping your shoes on. You become a brilliant curator of a life you’re not actually walking through.

So the test can’t be how well I explain myself. It has to be whether the next step lands any differently. Whether, having felt the left turn coming, I take it with my eyes open instead of asleep.

I don’t have this sorted. I noticed it this morning and it’s still there in the grass, undecided, watching me write about it as if writing about it counted as walking.