I thought I would walk to downtown Abilene from my house. My house is about a mile from campus, next to the Riatta Ranch Apartments. It took a long time to get to the Paramount Theater. It was about 1:30 in the morning when I started out, and 3:00 in the morning when I finally got back home. People are pretty slow without cars.

It was strange to walk for a five minutes, look up, and find that the downtown buildings still looked as far away as ever. In a car, five minutes is all it takes to get there.

When you walk, the roads look different, the signs look huge, and cars passing you are a really big deal. You feel like you’ve shrunk.

Space feels different at a walking pace. It feels more connected. The city of Abilene was all broken up in my mind before this. It was segmented into little spaces like campus, my house, downtown. These little spaces were all connected by “car-space,” which doesn’t really feel real. Walking around connected everything. It filled in the roads with “real space,” so to speak.

It was almost unsettling how different everything looked, how different everything felt. Trying to move over a distance longer than our college campus was an alien experience. But it was an important one, I think.

The huge difference between the two transportation methods, walking and driving, gives you a lot to thing about. I thought of driving as a pretty normal activity, now it seems much stranger. I thought I could imagine what a long-ish walk would be like by taking my driving experiences and slowing them down in my head. But you can’t do that, it’s not the same at all.

How many other experiences in life are comparable to this? How many other ways of doing things would seem completely different with a little perspective? We won’t know unless we try new things once in a while. We won’t really know much at all if we don’t.