A long walk yesterday as the earth warmed around me. Families were ambling together, young children running ahead, babes in arms.

It wasn’t exactly the paseo, the leisurely evening strolls you see in Portugal, Spain and other European countries. It was too early and too diffuse for that. But it was movement for the sake of movement, not to get anywhere in particular.

Compared with these folks I must have seemed a woman on a mission. But at the end of the walk, I may have been as relaxed as some of those slower strollers. I know I was looser of limb, more open to life’s possibilities. And that, I think, is worth ninety minutes.

(The lights had come on but people were still strolling on this June 2022 evening in Lisbon.)