The roads are quiet at the moment, for reasons we are all painfully aware of, so a necessary drive turned into something close to a treat. Three hours, mostly empty motorway, and a podcast backlog I had been promising to get through since roughly January.
There is a particular kind of thinking that only happens when your hands are busy and your eyes are forward. I have never solved a work problem at my desk the way I solve it in the car. Something about having no keyboard to reach for. You cannot tinker, so you have to actually think it through, and by junction whatever I had untangled a thing that had been sitting in the back of my head for a fortnight.
The podcast was good too, one of the long technical ones where two people who clearly like each other argue gently about a thing for an hour. I will not pretend I remember every detail. But I got home calmer than I left, which after this many weeks indoors counts for a great deal. Sometimes the fix is just movement and someone else's voice in your ears.