W-A-L-K

What we can learn from the woman who sacrificed her greenlight on a Monday

Anne Lamott begins her book Somehow with the following quote from her husband: Eighty percent of everything that is true and beautiful can be experienced on any ten-minute walk. Two weeks ago, my partner Lucy and I put this thesis to the test.

It was a very Monday-y Monday. By 7 pm, I still hadn’t stepped foot outside of our apartment, completing both my morning workout and 9-5ish job from the friendly confines of our one-bedroom apartment. As the April sun drooped, we slipped on our sneakers and headed out the door, our winter coats staring back at us like left behind puppies.

Lucy and I go for walks like an old retired couple. On a regular basis, we walk thirty minutes to acquire Sweetgreen (forty minutes if we aren’t too hangry and take the long way). Last Friday, our date night included a romantic stroll on side-by-side treadmills in an empty park district gym. Over the years, we’ve walked along Lake Michigan, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Mediterranean Sea. And we’ve walked laps inside abandoned malls, Walgreens and Marianos. That Monday’s walk wasn’t anything special. In fact, it might’ve been our shortest W-A-L-K to date. A quick loop around the neighborhood, racing the sunset back home. Ten minutes tops.

We rounded the last corner and began our jaywalk across a deserted street when a silver sedan appeared in our path. As the traffic light to our left gleamed green under the sunset, the woman behind the wheel locked eyes with us. Beneath her hijab, her soft gaze exuded remorse as if she’d just committed a horrible crime. With her greenlight glimmering, the woman proceeded to reverse ten feet in the middle of the intersection until her front wheels tucked neatly behind the crosswalk. Re-read that sentence next time you have road rage.

At this point, Lucy and I had aborted our jaywalk and retreated to the sidewalk, our hands motioning for the woman to proceed across the street. But the woman smiled back at us, her wheels glued to the ground without a honking car in sight, as she gestured to us to cross the street. I was stunned. Never have I ever witnessed such compassion behind a motorized vehicle. Lucy and I stayed on our street corner, pointing at the greenlight as we gazed at the smiley woman, who then motioned again for us to walk. We went back and forth like that for ten seconds—an eternity in traffic time—until the light began its descent to red, and the walking stick figure ignited across the street. Lucy and I shuffled past the silver sedan as the woman’s warmth radiated through the front windshield. The three of us smiled in synchrony, and I could feel the magic that can only be felt when all parties of a moment are fully present. The magic that resides inside everything that is true and beautiful.

It’s been over two weeks since our traffic transcendence, and I can’t stop replaying the scene in my head. Lucy and I each have fully remote jobs in our one-bedroom apartment. I repeat: Lucy and I work forty-plus hours a week within a 20-foot radius of each other. And we still love each other. We spend most of our weekdays hunkered down at our respective desks—Lucy’s in the bedroom, mine next to the fridge—flinching at the ping of a Slack message or the ring of a Microsoft Teams call. By the time we go on our evening excursion to scoop Sweetgreen for dinner, it feels like a corporate hangover. The past eight hours become a blur as our brains try to reclaim whatever mental real estate remains for the day, which is usually just enough brain power to arrive at the point of no return: What are we doing with our lives?

Once we hit this existential question, it’s pretty much game over. We vent back and forth, each of us feeling light years behind in our respective passions and life purposes as our minds go 80 mph on a 55. On a good week, we accomplish something that moves our purpose forward. I get a piece published in a magazine. Lucy asks Kelley O’Hara a question at a sports conference. We are ecstatic, for a second. But then comes the next thing—the next greenlight to catch. Go, go, go. Don’t look back, and don’t you dare reverse. Go, go, go.

We are always going somewhere. If we wanna get super Socrates, we can call everything a pit stop on the way to our fated destination, Death Avenue. Pit stops are the do’s—the published pieces, the conferences, the down payment on a house. We get to one pit stop, only to start planning our route to the next stop on our list. Life is in constant motion. Even when we are stuck, time is happening, moving forward. In a world where we contemplate, “What are we doing with our lives,” how can we just be? What can we learn from the woman who reversed from an intersection and halted at her greenlight?

When Lucy and I went on our first date in July 2022, I gifted her a “Slow Down Kids Playing” traffic sign (which was legally acquired from Amazon). Not exactly chocolates and roses, I know. But to me, this bright yellow metallic sign captured what I felt in those first giddy days together, and everything I hoped to feel in the years that followed. It was a mixture of peace and play, where the world no longer felt like a marathon but a playground. We could walk, bike, drive for hours without feeling the rush of our 80 mph adult world. And we could talk about our dreams like two toddlers filled with imagination, possibility, time.

The woman behind the wheel reminded me of this childlike wonderland, where time loses its scarcity and we forget where we’re going because we’re so here. Smiling with a stranger as the traffic light moves through its spectrum of go, slow, stop. I understand it’s not realistic to live every moment stopped at a greenlight. My book isn’t going to publish itself! Unless you’re a monk or my dad (who I suspect was a monk in a past life), many of your days are likely a series of greenlights—getting to the gym, grabbing coffee, logging into work, responding to a gazillion emails. Go, go, go. While we venture toward the places, passions, and purposes that call us, I wonder if it’s possible to practice a little “recess” during our busy days. Ten minutes of walking or painting or banjo-ing. Something to remind us that no matter where we think we may be going, we’re all just running around in the same playground. Like the acrostic poem I just discovered suggests:

We

Are

Lost

Kids

Now that your mind is officially blown, I’ll leave you with a quote from a piece written by a dear friend, who compares this pendulum of doing and being to a body in water: “I want to believe that abundance is possible, that I can have the water and the sun, the ease and the bliss. That I can float when I want to and work to swim when I choose, that I can be in a dance of challenge and rest.”