Take a step forward.
This time in India. You have now been walking for five years.
Here, something strange happens. Seventh largest country in the world, India is a colossus. It takes you 17 months to travel its northern extent. Yet India still seems small. Respondent. Handy. Your journey of nearly 2,400 miles across the nation is like walking through a village. Admittedly, daily life in the immense panorama of 664,369 Indian villages is well compacted, on a human scale. But it’s more than that: it’s due to the density of Indian weather.
By some standards, India may seem like a poor country. This often results in a man-made environment that is antique, handmade. You sip your milk tea from a bhar, one of the millions of disposable clay cups that, once used, you throw over your shoulder: each of these small containers is molded by the fingers of an artisan. You sleep on a charpoy, a hand-woven twine bed. Rural houses? Few can claim a single true right angle: they are erected with hand tools and hired muscle. your breakfast chapatis are hand caressed by a handmade fire. This slower manual world is somehow deeply familiar and mysteriously comforting.
Why?
Because, for better or for worse, collectively bringing the billions of elements of this cosmos into existence requires incomprehensible hours, days, weeks, millennia of prolonged human attention. You absorb this investment.
You come out of India staggering like the heart of a star: imbued with compressed time.
Take a step forward.
In the sixth year of your continuous journey on foot around the world, you walk in Myanmar.
In Yangon, the commercial capital, a coup is taking place. The police shoot children in the head.
“Slow down where it hurts,” advises a writer friend. He talks about work. But in this case, such advice is free.
Because in Myanmar, time stands still. Or rather, it loops. And a part of you is still there, wandering endlessly through the streets of the Tamwe district, where a man feeds pigeons cereal that spills on the bloodstains.
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