A walk does not need to count.

A friend once asked whether our after-dinner walk still counted because neither of us had started a workout on our watches. We laughed, then noticed how quickly a small pleasure had become something that needed proof. The walk had taken us past a sleepy fruit stall, through the smell of rain on hot pavement and into a conversation we had been postponing for weeks. It had already done plenty.

Walking is wonderfully ordinary. It can be transport, exercise, company, thinking time or simply a way to let the day loosen its grip. Once every walk has to reach a pace, distance or calorie target, that roomy definition becomes much smaller. We start looking at our wrists instead of the street, and an evening that felt good can somehow appear insufficient on a screen.

Let the city interrupt you

Hong Kong rewards an unplanned route. A staircase becomes a lane, the lane opens onto a temple, and ten minutes later you are watching somebody mend a chair outside a shop. These are tiny encounters, but they return scale and texture to a city that can otherwise feel like a sequence of lifts, trains and deadlines. A purposeful walk gets you somewhere; a wandering one lets somewhere reach you.

This does not make tracking bad. Numbers can be useful when they answer a question you genuinely have. They become less useful when they quietly decide whether an experience was worthwhile. If you came home warmer, calmer or more connected to the person beside you, the walk did not fail because it missed an arbitrary ring.

Keep one route just for pleasure

Choose one familiar route and remove the assignment. No personal best, no podcast you ought to finish, no promise to answer messages while moving. Notice which balconies have plants, where the air changes near the water, and which corner shop is still bright. Turn back when you feel like it. Stop for a drink. The point is not to become better at leisure; it is to remember that leisure was never an exam.

There will still be days for brisk laps and training plans. But a life made only of measurable movement loses some of movement’s oldest comforts: going beside someone, clearing the head, feeling weather arrive, and returning home by a slightly different street. Those things count, even when nothing counts them.