There is a specific pleasure in leaving the house with no destination. Not lost — losing yourself takes effort in a city you know — but unassigned. Take the street you’ve never bothered with. Turn where the light is better.
The situationists called it the dérive and wrapped it in theory. Dogs call it a walk and are more honest about it.
What I notice, when I drift like this, is that the city reorganizes itself. The mental map I navigate by — home, work, the four restaurants I actually go to — turns out to be a skeleton with almost nothing on it. The flesh is in the side streets: the shop that only sells buttons, the courtyard with the improbable tree, the wall where someone has painted, carefully, a very bad horse.
None of it is useful. All of it is the point.
I’ve started rating my walks by how hard they’d be to retrace. The best ones are unrepeatable.