The road that asks you to listen
Reflections from a long walk — on silence, simplicity, and the unexpected conversations that change everything.
There is a particular kind of quiet that only shows up after the third or fourth hour of walking. Not the quiet of an empty room — that one is easy to fill with your phone. This is the quiet that arrives once your body has stopped negotiating and your mind has run out of things to rehearse.
I did not expect to like it.
What you carry
Everyone starts a long walk carrying too much. You pack for the version of yourself who might need a second jacket, a third book, the shoes that go with nothing. By the second day you are quietly leaving things behind and hoping nobody notices.
It is embarrassing how directly this maps onto everything else.
I have spent a lot of my life carrying a story I did not talk about — being born in El Salvador during the war, leaving, arriving somewhere colder and starting again. For years I told a two-sentence version of it and changed the subject. It seemed lighter that way. It was not. Carrying something in silence is not the same as putting it down.
The load does not get lighter because you refuse to name it. It gets lighter when you finally set it in front of someone else and say: this is what I have been walking with.
The conversations
The strange gift of a road like this is that you talk to people you would otherwise never meet, and you talk to them properly, because there is nothing else to do and nowhere else to be.
I met a man who had walked the same route four times. I asked him why. He said the first time was for his marriage, the second was for his health, the third was because he had liked the second — and the fourth, he said, was the first time he had come without a reason. He seemed happiest about that one.
I met a woman who had lost her brother the year before and was walking because she could not sit still. She did not want advice. She wanted someone to walk at her pace for an hour, and then to say goodbye without making it a whole thing.
Neither of them asked what I did for a living. It took me two days to notice how much I liked that.
What I brought home
Three things, and I am still working on all of them.
- Silence is a skill, not an absence. You have to practise being unentertained before you can hear anything worth hearing.
- Simplicity is a decision you make repeatedly. Not a state you reach once. Every morning you repack the bag and choose again.
- The important conversations are almost never scheduled. They happen at the pace of walking, with someone whose surname you never learn.
I came home and started writing the book properly. Not because the road told me to — roads do not do that — but because I had spent two weeks with people who told me true things without being asked, and it began to seem unreasonable that I would not do the same.
The walking part is over. The rest of it, I am fairly sure, is not.