The Evenings When I Stopped Walking the Same Street and Found Myself Again

There exists a moment, always the same moment, when the body begins to walk without asking permission to the mind. I had lived this for almost three years in my neighborhood in Heredia, taking the identical route each evening after the sun started to lower itself behind the mountains. The same four blocks toward the east, the turn at the bakery where don José always had his radio playing cumbia, the stretch of sidewalk lined with the old guanacaste trees, and then the return. And one Tuesday, without knowing very well why, I took the turn toward the west instead of the east, and something inside the chest opened like a window that had been shut for a long time. The truth is that I do not know if it was boredom or if it was necessity, but that small change of direction gave me back something I had forgotten I possessed: the capacity of being surprised by my own surroundings, by the air of my own town.

The Weight of Repetition and How It Enters the Bones

One does not realize it little by little, no. The thing is that repetition is something very silent, very patient. It arrives dressed as comfort, as security, as the pleasant sensation of knowing where each stone of the sidewalk is, where the root of the tree lifts the cement, where the neighbor’s dog will bark and where it will not. And one says to oneself, “this is good, this is my routine, this is order.” But order, when it becomes too tight, begins to feel like a corridor without doors. I noticed it first in the way I was breathing during those walks. Not that I was tired, not that the distance was too much. It was that the breath had become automatic, mechanical, as if the lungs had decided they no longer needed to pay attention because nothing new was going to happen. The evening light was falling on the same walls, the same wires, the same cracked facade of the old school. And I was walking, yes, but I was not truly being there. I was a body in transit, nothing more. The mind had gone somewhere else entirely, perhaps to the worries of the next day, perhaps to nothing at all, which is sometimes worse.

That First Evening of Turning in a Different Direction

I remember it with a clarity that still causes me a small emotion. It was a Wednesday, maybe a Thursday, and the sky had that particular color we get here in the valley when the clouds sit low and the light comes through them filtered, golden but soft, like light that has been washed. I turned toward the west, toward streets I knew existed but had never walked with intention, with slowness, with the eyes actually open. And there, two blocks from my house, a street I had crossed a thousand times in the car but never with my feet on the ground, I discovered a small garden behind a rusted gate where someone was growing passion fruit and had hung tiny blue lights between the branches. I stopped. I stood there like a fool, looking at those little lights, at the purple fruits hanging in the half-dark, and I felt something I can only describe as gratitude. Gratitude toward my own neighborhood for keeping this secret from me for so long. Gratitude toward my own feet for finally carrying me to see it. That evening I walked forty minutes instead of my usual twenty-five, and I arrived home with a strange happiness, the kind that does not shout but hums quietly under the ribs.

The Small Discoveries That Only Walking Slowly Reveals

The thing about changing the route is not the grand revelation, no. It is not that one suddenly finds a hidden waterfall or a forgotten temple in the middle of San José. The discoveries are small, almost embarrassing in their simplicity. A house with a courtyard full of heliconias that I had never noticed because I had always passed it from the other side. The sound of a marimba coming from a second-floor window on a street where I had never heard music before. The way a particular stretch of road smells of wet earth and mango in the evening because there is a tree that drops its fruit and no one picks it up, and the whole ground becomes a sweet, fermenting carpet. These are not things that change the world. But they change the walker. They return the senses to their work, which is to notice, to register, to say “ah, this exists, this is here, this is real.” I began to understand that my previous route had not been bad, had not been ugly. It was simply that my eyes had closed to it through pure familiarity. The new routes did not give me new streets. They gave me new eyes for streets that had always been there.

Making It a Practice Without Turning It Into an Obligation

Now, I do not want to give the impression that I became a person who plans every evening with a map and a compass, calculating distances and variations. No, no. The whole spirit of this would be lost if it became another task, another box to mark. What I do is simpler and also more difficult: I let myself decide at the corner. I arrive at the intersection and I ask myself, “where do the feet want to go tonight?” And sometimes they want to go toward the river, where the sound of the water is strong in the evening and the air comes cooler. Other times they want to go uphill, toward the part of the neighborhood where the houses have gardens with flowering trees and one can smell jasmine from two blocks away. There are evenings when I repeat a route from the previous week because I want to see if the bougainvillea on the yellow house has bloomed more. There is no system. There is only the willingness to not be automatic, to keep the small ceremony of choosing, of letting the evening be a question instead of an answer already given. This is the only rule I have imposed on myself, and it has been enough.

The Body Asks for Variety in the Same Way the Mind Asks for It

I noticed also, and this is something I had not expected, that the body responds differently when the ground changes. Not in any dramatic way, nothing that one must worry about or measure. But the small muscles of the ankles and the knees work in different ways when the incline changes, when the surface goes from smooth cement to the uneven stones of an older street, when one must step over a root or navigate a slight curve. The walk becomes less of a mechanical repetition and more of a conversation between the feet and the earth. I sleep better on the nights when I have walked a route with some small variation in the terrain, though I cannot explain this with precision. Perhaps the body simply enjoys being asked to pay attention, being given a small task beyond the monotony of the same flat, same straight, same predictable line. The evening walk becomes, then, not exercise in the cold sense of the word, but a kind of play, a kind of gentle negotiation with the landscape.

A Small Note About Caring for the Body From the Inside

And speaking of the body and of walks, I must mention something that a friend of mine, doña Carmen from the market, told me about some months ago, and that I have kept in mind since. She spoke to me of Esbelita, a supplement that she uses as a companion to her own evening walks, something that helps her feel lighter and more in agreement with her body as the weeks pass. I am not a person who gives recommendations lightly, and I do not say this as one who sells or promotes. I say it because she told me with that particular insistence that Costa Rican women have when they have found something that works for them, and because I know that for many people, the walk is not only about the mind but also about slowly, gently, returning the body to a place of comfort with itself. The truth is that one can look for Esbelita only through the official page, which is esbelita.fit and there one finds the information directly without intermediaries. I leave this here not as advice but as a mention, a small note passed from hand to hand, as doña Carmen passed it to me over a bag of fresh tomatoes and a bunch of cilantro.

The Evening as a Territory of Freedom

What I have come to understand, after almost a year now of varying my paths, is that the evening walk was never really about the walking. Or rather, it was about the walking, but walking as a form of freedom, as a small daily act of saying “I am here, I am in this place, I choose to see it.” In a life that is increasingly full of screens, of obligations, of the same chair and the same desk and the same four walls, the evening offers a territory that belongs to no one but the one who walks it. And when that territory changes each night, even slightly, even just one street shifted to the left or one turn taken instead of another, the territory becomes infinite. My neighborhood has not grown. The streets are the same streets. But they are no longer the same streets to me, because I have given them the opportunity to be different, to show me their other face, their evening face, their face that only appears when someone walks them slowly and with attention. This is, I think, a small form of love. Love for the place where one lives. Love for the ordinary. Love for the Tuesday evening and the Thursday dusk and the particular way the light hits a wall that one has never looked at before.

What I Would Say to the Person Who Reads This and Thinks It Is Too Simple

Perhaps you are reading this and thinking that it is too little, that walking a different street is not going to change anything, that the world is too heavy and too fast for such a small gesture to matter. And I understand. I would have thought the same thing three years ago. But I would ask you only this: try it one evening. Just one. Turn where you never turn. Walk the block you always skip. Go toward the direction that feels slightly unfamiliar, slightly uncertain. You do not need to walk far. You do not need to walk long. You only need to walk with the eyes of someone who has just arrived, who does not yet know what is around the next corner. And if nothing extraordinary happens, if you find only the same houses and the same wires and the same cracked sidewalks, then at least you will have broken the spell of the automatic for one evening. You will have been present in your own life for twenty minutes instead of passing through it like a ghost. And that, I promise you, is not too little. That is, in fact, the beginning of everything. The evening is waiting for you out there, and it has so many faces that you have not yet seen. You only need to turn a different corner and let it show you.