The road out of town at half seven in the morning, in November, in North Yorkshire: the moors pressing down on the horizon, the damp getting into your collar before you’ve reached the edge of the estate. Four miles there. Four miles back. Every day, five days a week, the whole of secondary school, more or less. I walked it in all weathers — which, in North Yorkshire, means I walked it in rain, in horizontal rain, in something technically classified as rain but which had clearly given up the pretence of falling and was just occupying all available space.

People used to ask why I didn’t get the bus.

The bus had bullies on it. That’s the short answer. The long answer is more complicated and I’m not sure I have it entirely right even now, but it goes something like this: the bus was a closed system. Forty-five minutes, no exits, a social hierarchy that had been set months before I arrived and that was not interested in revising itself. On the bus you were whoever the bus had decided you were. You could not walk away from that. You could not put headphones in and stop existing.

On the road, I was whoever I was in my own head.

The Walkman was the first version. Sony, AA batteries, the kind that ate through them in about four hours so you learned to carry spares. Then a MiniDisc player when I could afford one — which felt, at the time, like actual science fiction. You could record albums onto a disc the size of a biscuit. You could carry six hours of music in a jacket pocket. I don’t know if younger people understand what a profound shift that was; probably not, in the same way I don’t fully understand what it felt like to be handed a radio for the first time. But to walk out of the house at seven-thirty with your own soundtrack already running — that was something.

The walk was thinking time, mostly. Not structured thinking. Not the kind where you set a problem and work through it. More like defragmentation — the mind getting to rearrange itself without supervision. School was loud in ways that had nothing to do with volume. The social calculation required just to move through a corridor was exhausting in a way I couldn’t have articulated then and can articulate now only with the benefit of hindsight and a couple of decades of reading about how certain kinds of brains actually work. The walk was the opposite of that. Nobody needed anything from me. The moors didn’t have an opinion about my choices.

I understand now what that time actually was: the brain needs gaps. Not gaps between tasks. Gaps where nothing is asking you to respond, to perform, to code-switch, to calibrate your volume. The repetitive motion of walking, the familiar terrain, the rhythm of breathing — that’s when pattern recognition happens. That’s when the background processes run. It’s the same mechanism that makes shower insights happen, the same reason research teams scatter and regroup. The focused work is valuable. The incubation is essential.

Here is the thing I have come to believe, which I could not have told you at fifteen: if I had stayed on that bus every day, I would have learned to manage it. I would have learned the small adjustments, the self-erasures, the slightly-flattened version of yourself that group dynamics require. I would have got quite good at it, eventually. I would have come out the other end a much more socially functional person and a much less useful one. I would have been a sycophant. Not because I’m constitutionally resistant to sycophancy — I’m not, I can do it when I have to — but because I would have practised it every day for five years and got fluent in it, and you don’t easily unlearn fluency.

There was a specific thing the bus did that I found, and still find, actually quite troubling to think about. Not the straightforward bullying — that’s just people being unkind, and people are sometimes unkind, and there’s nothing philosophically interesting about it. What bothered me was the recruitment dimension. There was always a moment, in those closed systems, when someone who wasn’t themselves a bully would participate anyway — would laugh, would echo, would make themselves useful to something they didn’t actually endorse — because the cost of not doing it was too high and the cost of doing it seemed low. I understood the logic completely. I hated the logic completely. And I was not entirely confident, at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, that I was above it. The safest thing was to be somewhere else.

The road was somewhere else.

I remember specific patches of it. A section where the hedge grew over the path and you had to push through in wet weather and came out the other side soaked to the shoulder. A long flat stretch where the wind came off the moor with real intent and you put your head down and your hands in your pockets and just ground through it. A farm gate you could lean on while you changed the disc. Landmarks of a commute that nobody had designed as a commute, that had no amenities, that existed purely because the alternative was worse.

I don’t want to make it sound like a spiritual discipline. It wasn’t. It was a wet hedge and frozen fingers and arriving at school with mud on my trousers and not quite enough time to dry out before first period. But it was mine. That’s the only word for it. For two hours a day, the experience was entirely, uncomplicatedly mine.

I still structure time this way. Four hours of focused work. Then nothing. A walk, or unscheduled silence, or whatever else the day presents. Not because I’m precious about it, but because that’s when the connections form. That’s when you spot the pattern you missed. That’s when the research actually happens. The synchronous team meetings, the back-to-back calls, the Slack pings — those are valuable, but they’re not where thinking occurs. Thinking needs gaps.

The road taught me that eight miles is exactly the right distance. Not a sprint. Not a stroll. Just long enough that your conscious mind gives up arguing and the background processes get to work. I’ve never found anything better. I probably never will.