Notes from a slow January
On rest, walking the same route, and why I no longer keep a public roadmap.
January again. I walked the same route every morning for four weeks. Not because I planned to, but because the decision of where to walk takes energy I don’t have before coffee, and the familiar route takes none.
By week three, I started noticing things. The green door that is always slightly open. The corner where pigeons congregate for no visible reason. The specific angle of light at 8:15 that makes the old pharmacy look like a painting.
Familiarity is underrated. We talk about novelty — the new city, the new tool, the new year — as if repetition were a failure of imagination. But repetition is how you learn what something actually is, rather than what it looks like on first encounter.
I deleted my public roadmap in January. Not because the work changed, but because I noticed the roadmap had started to manage my attention rather than describe it. I was choosing projects that fit the roadmap rather than following where the work wanted to go.
The slow months are for noticing. I try to let them be that.