Before college, I thought just walking alone around a city was the quaintest thing. Something about the freedom of it. You don’t coordinate some big ordeal with a car or other people, and you don’t have to cart around books or a laptop and all of those implications. You can be alone for as long as you want and think about whatever you want. You don’t have to be courteous or asinine. You watch other people, instead of cars watching you, and in a city, there’s shops and stands and courtyards to see instead of front yards and general suburbia. The last scenes of Lady Bird, when she’s walking around after she gets out of the hospital and wanders into a church, I so wanted to do that. I was all over that.

Well you can walk up and down the streets in Charleston for hours. I’ll be the first to say. My first awful winter there I used to walk until my lungs hurt. Maybe that spoiled it, because these days I really only walk alone when I’m mad or sad or stressed and I have nothing else to try or no one else to bother. There’s something to be said there, about expectations versus reality or taking things for granted. Something about killing the dream by living it too much.

But I was right. It is quaint. It’s even quaint when I’m thinking myself into a bad mood. I walk past a 300 year old house covered in ivy or the Saturday farmer’s market in Marion Square and convince myself my friends hate me. Even then I can find it in myself to stop and take a picture, send it to my mom. Does that mean I shouldn’t go on walks alone anymore or does it mean the aesthetic power of Charleston absolves all sin. Maybe a little bit of both. Probably more of the former, because walks with other people are happier. I have the sweetest memory of walking in Charleston with two of my best friends and literally skipping down the road out of joy. If you know me, that’s a little out of my element. It was overcast and we were walking to nowhere, but I was just so thrilled to be with them. That had nothing to do with quaintness.

When people talk about their relationship with God, sometimes they use the phrase “my walk with God.” I’ve even heard just “my walk.” So there must be a spiritual quality about walks in general. I would say that’s true. For every walk I go on, I learn the city better, and I have it on 1240 words of good authority that familiarity is crucial to my spiritual wellbeing. Walking and seeing the sun for the first time after a 24-hour-inside-challenge is pretty spiritual too. I could do something transcendentalist right now and talk about the nature I see on my walks, and then God, and then a pretentious revelation about the spiritual importance and divine conduit of Palmetto trees, but I don’t really care about that kind of thing. I care about the teaching moment of getting out of the house and seeing how other people live. Maybe it’s just Charleston, but the girls are cool and the guys are carefree and everyone looks vaguely beachy. On multiple occasions, I’ve listened to girls say the phrase, “have so much fun” when they leave their friends as if that is their greatest wish for them. A musician played on top of a truck on King Street once, and people sat on the sills of their second-story windows to sing along. Sometimes I take the long way to the dining hall on a Friday, and I pass groups of girls dressed up for dinner at an actual restaurant and taking pictures, laughing, on the street corner. When it snowed this past winter, I watched guys in trucks speed people down the empty streets with surfboards rigged as sleds.

People live fully here. I walk past them and know I could live a better life than I have been. Be freer, pure and actual. Stop cheating myself out of good things or reflecting what I’ve always been told about myself. If we’re talking about walks with God again, I would say these walks where I witness full lives have less of the spiritual aspect and more of the transformative one. I no longer think it’s worth it to live with my head down or to run myself ragged. I walk past proof in the flesh. I don’t scrape a watery life together anymore, because I can see how substantive life can be if you put substance into it first.