A walk without anticipation - Laila banu

Today was different from before – a long day. I reached our stay at Suruttal around 12:45 a.m. I returned from my college in Gobi, where I had gone to avail my laptop. So I felt two days bunched up into one, without rest. The day after bus travel is usually exhausting, but surprisingly, during today’s walk I was energetic – like realizing the preciousness of a thing once lost.

We started this walking trail 18 days ago. Last year we walked 400 km in 18 days. These two sets of 18 days are not the same. Last year I was energetic and alert, and my mind was filled with doubt and novelty. This year it was silence and clarity. Even with uncertainty about our stay, there was a stillness and a hope that somehow we would get one.

Last year, during every day’s walk, I was following Google Maps for kilometers, photographing places that were beautiful, and the anticipation of completion was high. This year, the act of walking itself became more significant than the completion.

As I was ruminating on this, I remembered a conversation with Sibi. We were walking silently. I said, “The days passed quickly.” He replied, “But if you look closely, every day was dense.” I paused my footsteps, because I did not feel it was dense. Sibi seemed to be speaking about the accumulation of experiences throughout the day. He could turn every incident into an experience. For me, however, everything felt compressed along with time.

As I look back at last year’s walk, it felt like an accumulation of experiences every day. This year, I had forgone the tracking of incidents. My internal voice had become silent; it felt as though I was no longer observing 

what I was doing.

This state of immersion was fragile. A seemingly normal natural scenery or a small conversation could break it. Only when I came out of that state could I realize where I had been before.

So there was a difference in experiencing things?

- Laila banu