A walk instead of the feed

Nobody visits a garden the way most of us visit a phone.

Picture it in Al-Azhar Park on a cool afternoon. You stop at a bench because something about it caught your eye. You look for half a minute, lose interest, move to a lamp post, then a hedge, then another bench. Three hours of this, never sitting down, never reaching the view over the old city, never remembering a single thing you looked at. Anyone watching would worry about you.

On a screen it is an ordinary evening. Tap, glance, flick, tap. A clip, a headline, a stranger's argument, a product we did not want, then the next one. We call it relaxing, and we get up from it more tired than when we sat down.

The difference is not the content. It is that the park was not designed to keep you uneasy enough to keep moving. The feed often is. Each thing is placed there to tug a little, to promise that the next one will be worth stopping for, and to leave you slightly unsettled when it is not. Drifting through that does not loosen the mind. It narrows it.

A real walk does the opposite. The feet go somewhere, the eyes rest on things that are not asking for anything, and the thoughts you could not find at your desk tend to turn up around the second corner.

So the next time the thumb starts drifting with nowhere in particular to go, it might be worth handing the job to the feet.