I walk for weeks at a time. The longest walk I’ve done was about forty days. Do this day after day — the intense mileage, the intense wordage, the looking, the talking, the boredom-bathing, the wringing texture and life from a day — and you are changed. It’s impossible not to be. The whole thing, an ascetic practice. I even shave my head like some performative mendicant, one who lives off stories as alms. I’ve been doing walks like this for six years now, and they’ve made me more patient, kinder, more optimistic about the world, people, more amazed than ever at how many goofy-ass animals (monkeys jumping off bridges, tiny bears running like little pigs, mountain crabs that have no right to exist up on a lookout) are out there in the woods.
But perhaps what I’ve gotten most out of these days is an understanding of “fullness.” That is, how much potential exists in the most banal-seeming of itineraries. How everyone has a story worth listening to, even if just for five minutes. How the details and patterns of life go unseen with a head stuck in a phone. And how — after having walked for eight straight hours, heavy pack on my back (multiple cameras, laptop, rain gear), and then having written for hours, edited, banged the text into a publishable state, added photographs, and hit send, finally at the end of the day) — when my head hits the pillow at night, I smile knowing there was no fuller day to be had, no better way to have played the cards dealt to me on that morning.
I realize now I didn’t know fullness before I started walking like this. The walk taught me fullness. It’s good like that, the walk. Walking. I’ve now got hundreds of “max full” days under my belt. You carry the feeling of those days back to your everyday life. You now have an archetype for a fully “used up” day. That’s a powerful thing, and one that can’t be learned through description alone. It must be felt in the bones after mile twenty, on the tenth day of doing twenty miles, on the tenth day of banging out a text, collimating the experience of connecting with strangers, feeling the sonder of those you pass, melding the day into words, pairing those words with images, creating a complete “object” or piece as it were. And then pushing it out into the world (the publishing at the end of the day creates a kind of stakes that I find is critical to eking out that last drop of fullness).
Craig Mod [x]
