Why I Walk to Work When the Bus Is Faster

There’s a stretch of sidewalk near the Dehiwala junction where the trees form a tunnel. You miss it entirely from the bus. From inside, all you see is the traffic ahead and the phone in your hand and the back of someone’s head.

But if you walk, you get this canopy — maybe forty meters of it — where the light comes through green and dappled and the noise from the main road drops just enough that you can hear birds. It lasts about two minutes at my pace. Then you’re back on the main road, dodging tuk-tuks, and the moment is over.

I don’t walk to work because it’s healthy. I walk because the bus is optimized for arrival and I’m not always in a hurry to arrive.

The economics of attention

There’s a cost to moving fast that nobody accounts for. Not the fuel cost or the ticket price — the attention cost. When you’re on the bus, you’re in transit. You’re between places. Your brain checks out. You scroll, you doze, you stare.

When you walk, you’re somewhere. You’re in the specific neighborhood between your home and your office. You notice things: the bakery that changed its sign, the new crack in the wall where the pipe burst last monsoon, the way the light hits the temple at 7:45 AM.

The walk doesn’t save time. It spends time. That’s the point.

What I’ve learned from sidewalks

Sidewalks teach you that most things worth noticing are not worth photographing. The light through the temple trees is better in memory than on a screen. The smell of fresh kottu from the corner shop at 8 AM is unreproducible.

But sometimes — maybe once a week — there’s a moment that asks to be recorded. A shadow that falls just right. A face that carries something you recognize. Those are the photos on this site.

The bus would have taken twelve minutes. The walk takes twenty-five. The difference is that I arrived with something to think about.