The car keys

You've run out of milk. The shop is half a mile away, which is about ten minutes on foot. You pick the keys up off the hook. You don't decide to. Your hand does it on the way past, and by the time you've thought about anything you're reversing off the drive. At the shop you pull in, and the space by the door is taken, so you go round once and take one three rows back, and walk from there.

At work your office is on the second floor. The lift lobby has four people in it looking at the numbers above the doors. You join them. The stairs are through a door to the left that nobody uses. You wait a minute and a half and ride two floors. On Thursday you pick your daughter up from school, which is six hundred yards from the house, and you drive, and you sit in the queue of cars outside the gate for longer than the walk would have taken, and she gets in, and you drive back.

If somebody asked, you'd say you're quite active. You're on your feet a lot. You don't feel like a person who sits around. But if you counted the distances your legs covered on a normal day, it would be the car park, the lift lobby, the corridors and the kitchen, and not much else. The legs are there. They're just the last thing you reach for.

This is an invented day, but I'd be surprised if you didn't recognise most of it. Some words, so we can talk about it plainly. I'll call the hand going to the keys or the lift button without a decision the default. It isn't laziness, and I'll say why in the next chapter. It's what happens when a car and a lift are always available and nobody has drawn a line. The line is the distance and number of floors below which you'd walk, and right now you haven't got one. A mile and three floors is where I'll suggest you start. Door to door is the honest time comparison, from the moment you decide to go to the moment you arrive, and it includes the keys, the car park and the lift lobby. The errand walk is walking to get somewhere, as against a walk for its own sake. The parking dance is going round for a space nearer the door. And a reason I'd say out loud is the test for when the car should win, which it sometimes should.

Before you go on, do one thing. For a week, keep a list. Every trip under a mile and every lift ride under three floors, with how you did it. Car, lift, walk, stairs. Don't change anything. Just write it down. At the end of the week, count. Most people who do this find twenty or thirty items on the list and two or three walks among them, and that ratio is what the rest of the book is about.