Charlie Sorrel, writing for Cult of Mac:

This one may already be enabled on your Mac. Try it now. Just place your thumb and fingers onto your trackpad, and spread them out. It’s as if you’re pushing away all those windows with your fingers, and that’s exactly what happens. The windows fly off to the sides of the screen, revealing your desktop.

If you’re minimizing apps to get to your desktop, or swiping to an empty space, there’s a quicker way. The shortcut keyboard combination described in the Cult of Mac article was new to me, and I always forget about the trackpad gesture. Not mentioned in the article is that if you have a MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar, you can also set up a virtual key to take you to your desktop.