Day 37
Heavy cloud all day. Patches of blue poke through but not for long, and never in the right place to bring with them any direct sunlight. The forecast promised heavy rain, but thankfully it never came. Chill breezes throughout the afternoon but only once lasting long enough that I needed to put my jacket on. Mild night.
11:12 I find myself in a window of disillusionment. 1,000 km into this year’s walk, nearly 2 weeks into a fight with the flu, and I’m tired.
11:42 The apartment sprawl of Kayseri is staggering. I remember seeing it from up on the mountain as I made my descent and thinking it looked unreal. Down here it looks real at least, but somehow feels more endless.
15:50 I just can’t enjoy these cities. Definitely this flu has knocked me about this last week and a half, but the real drag on my mood I think has been these cities and their orbits. Ever since Konya I have been in the orbit of cities. From the outskirts to the inner of Konya, back to the outskirts but only in order to move toward Aksaray, from there to Nevşehir, to Develi, and latterly to Kayseri, in the orbit of which I am still trapped. No wonder I have been struggling.
16:53 The impulse to journal has waned a lot since those first couple weeks of the walk. I think partly it’s the novelty wearing off again, getting back into the rhythm etc, but/and another major part is surely that I’ve been giving in to distraction. I say but/and because the two things are not exactly distinct, part of why I’m distracting myself is because the novelty has faltered. I want it back. But how?
Novelty is newness — but more than new places — new possibilities, new ideas. I fall into boredom because I fall into a pattern, padding out the same rhythm, playing out the same interactions. The best days are those I spend meeting curious people in rural places while I’m actively engaged in learning the language. This was true in Albania, and it was true here in Turkey in the two weeks after Istanbul. Each day I would try and add just a few words, a phrase, and the locals, sensing this, were endeared to me. But since Konya I have been just so lazy. In the last week I think I might have learnt three or four words.
17:11 I have been thinking of Helen and Irfaan a lot, especially since that message asking if I’m likely to return to Georgia for the winter after this years walk is done. I want to. I don’t doubt I can learn as much if not more from them as I did in that first winter in Albania, only this time I think I can do it with less of the insecurity that still rang so loud in me then.
18:24 Woah, the thoughts are coming back! I became aware of having been non-present, and gradually that awareness pulled me back to the present. I managed for an hour or two to resist every urge to distract or divert my mind, and that was enough to bring me back to where my feet are. I realised I was smiling as I walked.
18:51 It’s incredible. I wonder if I will have to be forever relearning this same lesson, that it is never the story of the world that is faulty, it is my story of the world that finds fault. Since my mood has slipped, I have dared to feel that untrue feeling again, the one that lets me believe that it is others who are unwelcoming or incurious. But it is always me. And as soon as I realised that today, truly as soon as I realised it, I found my way back to connection with people, and was reminded that the world outside always reflects the story within.
As that first smile of a present awareness swept back over my face, I fell into a short but sweet conversation with three young children in the village of Agirnas. They were leaning far out over their front gate, their feet not touching the ground on the other side. A moment later, in a tiny little shop, I got talking and laughing and sharing with Oğuz and Ibrahim. I tried something new with them, something I’ve been thinking about, instead of saying as I usually do that I am walking across Turkey I said I’m walking from England to India. Their reaction proved this the right choice, they were bowled over by the idea and as a few other customers popped in and out of the shop they excitedly spread this news. As I made to leave with the few groceries I had bought, I took Oğuz’s photograph and he liked that too, I’ll send it to him. Afterwards he leapt up, grabbed a bag, and scurried around his shop stuffing it with snacks and thrust it into my hands, bidding me good journey.
Most interesting to me was how effortless and natural it was. Interesting because only a couple of hours before my re-re-awakening, I had decided to end the daily portraits which I have kept up on every walking day so far this year. I had decided to give it up because it no longer felt true, the last couple days I have been phoning it in, doing the minimum, that is, making the minimum connection necessary to “get” a photograph. This I knew was not the authentic project that has brought me so much joy over these last few weeks, so I was on the cusp of letting it go, and then my mind came back to where my feet are and it is good again.
19:13 The body holds the mind, the mind holds the spirit, and the spirit meets the world.
19:20 I look out over this beautiful landscape and I see the work, the harm that we do to it and, this time at least, I am not concerned for the earth. The earth is going to be fine. Even then I almost said, “our planet is going to be fine” before catching myself, saw the very human hubris in that, that we claim this planet as our own. No, it’s not our planet. But this earth will be fine. When it has had enough of us, it will rid itself of us, as it now threatens to do. And when the human age is over it will reclaim everything we dared to call ours, exfoliating its skin until nothing remains of the eczema we have been on this body.
We are a cosmic speck, one of countless species who make a home on this bright blue marble that hangs in the three-dimensional canvas of a universe that extends far beyond our imagination. We are a rounding error next to nothingness. Sometimes I think we continue to exist by hubris alone, certainly I do not think our survival is essential except by recursion, we survive in order to go on surviving, we survive out of habit.
But this isn’t nihilism, at least not in the way I understood nihilism in my teens. This is a kind of liberation. We are free to imagine our own meaning and to make ourselves in that image, because that is all we can do.
20:36 I’m walking these beautiful dirt back roads through farmland, and it’s dark, and I’m casting around for a place to pitch my tent when I see headlights coming my way. The car comes to a stop as it reaches me and two men begin there good humoured interrogation. They are heading away but they have a house 2 km back the way they have come and want to deliver me there. I insist that I must walk so they point out the house to me on the satellite view and tell me to ask for Hasan when I get there.
Ask for Hasan, he is güvenilir (trustworthy) they say, tell him Rıdvan sent you.
(All delivered in Turkish, but translated).
By the map those 2 km are more like 3, but it won’t take very long. I wonder if the invitation to stay at the house means in the house, or beside the house?
20:59 I can see the lights of the house, I’m less than 10 minutes away.
21:32 What a welcome! Turns out Rıdvan, who I met out on the road, is the boss, so he was heading home to his family and this is the accommodation for his workers. Hasan is feeding me as much çorba and ekmek (soup and bread) as my heart and stomach can handle, while another four chip away at the story that has brought me here.
There is a younger Afghan man here, Tevik (?), whose been here for 7 years, he came overland of course, in the back of a relay of trucks. He speaks Turkish but cannot read it so I play my translations through the speaker.
22:08 I have been settled in the “upstairs”. This I think is where the boss stays if he doesn’t go home for the night. It is a large apartment. The rest of the workers sleep downstairs in bunk beds mostly. I feel unduly privileged but they wouldn’t have it any other way.
I am left, as I so often am, in wonder at this world. How is it that for much of the last few days I have been in a fog, in doubt, and as soon as that doubtful fog clears and I open myself to the beauty of this land, all of this reveals itself to me. All this kindness, all the grace of all these men, their generous gifts to me.
It is remarkable, so I remark. But how do I return this grace to the world? What is the gift that I give? That I must learn.
