Walking Without a Destination

I started, a few months ago, leaving the house without knowing where I was going.

Not far. Just out. A loop through the neighborhood, an unfamiliar street, a turn I had never taken because there was never any reason to. The rule was simple: do not check the map. If you don't know what is at the end of this lane, then go find out.

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This is a strange thing to do in Kathmandu. The city does not reward aimlessness in the way some European cities do — there is no clean grid, no scenic riverwalk, no obvious loop. You will end up in someone's courtyard. You will end up at a dead end with a buffalo in it. You will end up at a wall.

But you will also end up, occasionally, in places you did not know were there. A tiny temple set back from the road. A man making puja on a step. A child practising a bicycle, slowly, with extreme seriousness. A row of marigolds drying on a wall.

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I think the reason walking with a destination feels different is that the destination puts a frame around the walk. The walk becomes a means. Every step that is not in the direction of the destination is, in some small way, wasted.

When there is no destination, every step is the point. You are not on your way to anything. You are already there, by definition, because there is wherever your feet have currently landed.

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A friend of mine asked me why I do this. What if you get lost? — she said. And I realized that getting lost, in the bad sense, requires that you had been going somewhere specific. If you weren't going anywhere, you cannot fail to arrive.

What you can do is end up somewhere you did not expect. Which, when I think about it, is most of what I have ever wanted from travel, from books, from conversations, from any of it.

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I am not making the case that every walk should be aimless. Some walks have a point — the post office, the market, a friend's house. Fine. But I think most of us have organized so much of our movement around purpose that we have forgotten the other thing — the slow, attentive, useless walking that turns a city you have lived in for years into a city you are still discovering.

The city has been here the whole time. It is the walking that needed to change.