Going slower and looking closer

This previously appeared at the top of the recap of the first couple weeks of this year’s walk, which you can find here

A dry stone wall leads to a disused shepherds hut in the mountains between Lëpushë and Theth, Albania

There’s a few more of you wondering along while I wander along this year compared to last, so perhaps it bears recapping what I’m doing, and in doing that maybe I’ll get a smidge (or smoot?) closer to putting across why I’m doing it, because more than a few of you still think I’m crazy.

The nominal goal is still the same: walk every overland inch from Bristol, England to Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India, my middle-name-sake and the last rest-stop on my pilgrimage to the Himalaya. Last year I managed about 147,250,393.7 such inches, but if I’m doing it right, avash (slowly), I won’t manage quite so many this year. Put another way: to walk as far and as fast this year as I did last year would be a kind of failure. That’s just the pedestrian goal though, the footing, there are other, higher goals for the walk — largest among them is a desire to practice looking closer1.

In looking closer I want to pay more attention to languages, both spoken and unspoken, to the ways we all use and abuse language (and with it, each other). I want to look more closely at how I speak and write and how that effects what I’m able to say, see, and hear, who I can connect with, and how I am able to live. And I mean to better understand how what I do fits into who I am. I’ve been having spirited and spiriting conversations with a few people — Jess most intensely — about identity, and my tendency to keep mine small2, e.g. I don’t identify as a writer, I just write, but does that disinhibit or limit? Could I write/think better under different terms? I want to figure that one out.

I also want to use this looking closer to engage with photography more — to be less complacent, more attentive, and more generous with that effort — and to have a little more courage with it too (portraits! Kaur and I both find ’em heckin scary though). Ask more of it, share more of it, honour it with a little more rigour.

An old Ford farm truck pokes out from behind a corrugated shed near Labrazhd, Albania Three men lay hoses for crop irrigation in the evening between Gjakova and Prizren, Kosovo. Two silos stand amidst a quiet industrial lot on the outskirts of Prizren, Kosovo A half finished rural apartment building, a common sight in Albania

Most of all, this looking closer is about people. I’ve written before (Why the walk?) about belatedly figuring out that the missing pieces of me can only be found in others. It’d be impossible to talk about the changing shape of this walk without talking about Helen and Irfaan and their impact on me. But how to do it? How can I even begin to transmit the substance of that? How can I convey that no two people have inspired me more than they since Mizuki and Cy — and then how do I credit Mizuki and Cy for their part in this wander? (whereby this wander I mean this life) — heaven only knows, so I’m partitioning that off. I won’t write it now because it means more to me than I know how to write, in public anyway, and I’m afraid to fail, but it will come. Avash. Until then, still walking, but with fewer contours, more conversations.

  1. In an earlier version of this I’d tried out the phrases giving attention and giving myself (to language, to photography, to people), but I couldn’t help feeling that it didn’t quite fit. I tried reworking things but realised I was in danger of overfitting. The process eventually yielded a memory of something Craig wrote (Looking Closely is Everything) and immediately that fit.↩︎

  2. See Keep Your Identity Small for a partial rationale on that, but don’t imagine that I agree with all — or even much — of what Paul Graham says.↩︎