One of the biggest challenges of my epilepsy is that I can’t drive.  One of the biggest gifts is that I have to walk.

The Time Sunday Magazine published this week a series of vignettes on “Walking in New York.”  They were about family, ethnicity, history, memory, the idea of walking from place A to place B.  None were about the experience of having to walk.

The “having to” is actually the best part.  You walk when you’d rather not: when you’re tired, when the weather sucks, when you’re late.  But that’s when the walking gets into your feet, your joints, your breath.  You feel exactly your age.  Your gait takes on a four-beat tempo of an old rock ballad — a voice you grew up with, now toughening from the flute of desire to the baritone sax of nostalgia.

It’s also the repetition that matters.  When you first arrive in a foreign city, especially in the southern hemisphere, the environment assaults you.  Uneven and narrow sidewalks will trip you flat if you don’t pay attention.  Heat, laden with diesel and rotted food, will nauseate you.  Trinket sellers will hound you immediately.  But if you stay a few months, the street and air turn liquid, your walk becomes a subtle weave, and the touts don’t bother you at all.  Even this year, staying at home in a town where I’ve lived off-and-on for 20 years, I experience “taking a walk” as a sort of tourism.  To walk the same route every day is to become a local.

You escape the cocoon of power.  Drivers own the road, taking their mobile living rooms with them.  Walking, or waiting for a bus, I play a game from Gladwell’s “Blink”, forming micro-impressions of passing drivers.  Cellphone screamer, NPR indignant, Limbaugh indignant (I distinguish these by the cars they drive), turbo-mom, tech guy who can’t pull his head out of his OS, berated secretary, pressured salesman, muffler-deficient frat boy, parking-deficient sorority girl, tyrant boss, terrified teen, predator, prey.  Occasionally a driver spots me peeping.  In the last split second he glares back: “What are YOU looking at?”  Of course I’ve invaded his sanctum.  But I’ve also presumed on his status, like a commoner looking into a carriage.

Finally, you travel light.  These days, most of my morning walks are to the Courthouse for mediations.  It has a status-sorted taxonomy of justice.   Judges — the primates of the zoo — cruise into a gated underground door.  Big cat lawyers and canine paralegals unload banker’s boxes of trial exhibits from black SUVs.  Ungulate plaintiffs and defendants carry their burden of complaints, summonses and citations.  I, a new member of the order rodentia, walk up to the security station with nothing but a satchel containing reading glasses, a sack lunch, a pen and tablet, a laptop to draft an agreement or calculate child support, and a packet of Kleenex because somebody’s going to cry.

Afterwards, I often walk home lugging the weight of someone else’s sorrow.  Like the briefly-married couple agonizing over how to co-parent, for the next twenty years, a child who is now just six months old.  But comforting me is a sidewalk still wet from a three-day spring storm, strewn with dozens of earthworms.  Most of them are already lifeless and flat, but a few long red fellows flex robustly, washed unwillingly onto the concrete and determined to get off it before a robin gets them.  I play another of my favorite walking games.  Counting blessings is trite, obvious, the thing your grandmother scolded you into doing.  But you know, things become cliché for a reason.  And on this walk, I count two joys that were never on my list before: how I get from A to B, and the work I do once I arrive.