Avash, avash

Walking across northern Europe last year I told myself, “I’ll slow down when I reach Bosnia”. Without the pressure of the Schengen visa’s 90 days I’d be freed to wander slower, surely.

Crossing Bosnia that became “well, maybe I’ll slow down next year, why slack off now?” I was as fit as I’d been in a long time and big days felt good. Then Mizuki said that she’d join me for the walk across Montenegro and I said “perfect, I’ll slow down when Mizuki gets here”. By then the days were shorter, the company much better, and said company (Mizuki) had not spent the previous four months walking so we stayed more nights in rented rooms, ate better, and walked at a more sensible pace.

But this year it’s just me again and, for all that my fitness is half shot, that voice in my head urges me on just the same, tells me I’ll never reach the Himalaya if I don’t fill each day with footsteps.

Thankfully there are other voices now too — voices of restraint, voices that know how to appreciate life more fully — a mash-up of voices, chief among them Cy, Mizuki, Atlas, Helen & Irfaan. And I’m grateful for their voices, because it wasn’t just the visa that kept me from letting up last year.

I think this began as a short bit about walking, and it is about that, but also it’s about Silas being shy-less, anxiety, yada yada

My upbringing didn’t dispose me toward connecting with people. Both my parents are shy by nature and, lacking archetypes for what not shy might look like, I followed right along. But shy didn’t quite fit me, I became a contradiction, an anti-social extrovert. Anti-social because I wanted nothing to do with people, extrovert because people were what I needed most.

I really started to lose touch with the world aged nine, started pulling away from people as things started to disintegrate at home. At 10 it was off to the big school on the hill: six floors, a thousand kids, many absences, too many fights, and few friends — having pushed them all away. While most were gradually developing social fluency, I was practising truancy. And that contradiction above remained completely opaque to me at least until age 17 when I left home, even then it didn’t quite register. Another four years slipped by mostly unawares.

Fleeing to the far side of the world — seven years ago now — probably marks as good a beginning as any. An inflection point. The big change that lit a fire, lighting the way for many smaller but more significant changes. A gradual shedding of that ill-fitting outfit, of those layers of ideas that didn’t serve me — slowly making space for new ones that could. I see how shy I was then, and sometimes I wonder how to even gauge the change since. It feels enormous, yet I’m still shy.

My voice still sometimes doesn’t carry past my lips, instead catching on the last threads of old ideas, those old clothes. But few people see that any more, and in that reprieve I’ve gotten lazy. People say I’m not shy, and I let myself believe it, while my heart knows that I’m still cut off from parts of what life can be by those same voices I’ve been hearing in my head for most of my life.

Too timid to try, to ask, sometimes even too timid to dream. And that haste that defined last years walk? The visa excused it for a while, that and some amount of disinterest toward northern Europe. But reaching Bosnia shed those excuses, and still I continued apace, because haste offered up an inexhaustible excuse. If I told myself I needed to move quickly, even imagined it somehow a virtue, then I could recast every retreat (from people) as an advance (toward the Himalaya!). But haste makes waste — I was taking steps without in place of steps within.

Helen and Irfaan introduced me to avash, the Shqip word for slowly, and their good energy refocused me on just why I travel like this. I know there isn’t any incantation in any language that will rid me of the rest of my shyness in one swoop, it’s a journey, a very long (but thankfully rewarding) road, but avash has become the talisman of this chapter of it, and those two on their two wheels are the inspiration for it.

It took many years (and many people) to figure out that I’m an extrovert by nature, that I’m energised (not depleted) by people, that I merely adopted introversion by way of nurture and held on to it out of habit. And nobody (me included) knew any different until I scooted off to the far side of the earth, cycled half the length of the equator around Australia, fell in love, and met a bloke from Newcastle with a big red beard and a heart to match. If nothing else, I’m writing this to remind myself that this walk isn’t about getting to India, to the Himalaya, it’s about piecing together a little bit more of the puzzle, in the best way I know how: with other people.

Or is it just one contradiction in place of another¹? Not so much the anti-social extrovert any more, instead the lunatic who’s convinced himself he can get closer to things while also walking away. I wouldn’t be being honest if I didn’t acknowledge a hint of the ironic in that, but if I’m set on doing it anyway then I had better do it heart and soul — fulljoy².

So how am I getting on? Well, in the first 44 days³ of last year I laid waste haste to 1450 kilometres, took only 4 days off (to see ma, Grandma, and Canterbury), averaged over 36 kilometres a day, including 14 marathon days, plus a handful of days stretching to over 50 kilometres.

In the first 44 days of this year I’ve walked barely more than 700 kilometres, taken 17 days off, only done one marathon, and spent a good bit more time looking closely. It has even become my tentative ambition to not make it across Turkey this year. While it is certainly possible⁴, I think too much would be missed.

Avash is the word, avash is the way.