Walking in the mountains is a special world. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. It’s one of those things that you learn early on and then it comes naturally to you, you carry it in your whole life.
The peculiarity is not in the landscape, in the effort or in the satisfaction of getting to the top. I think the most important thing is that you can’t do anything but walk at your own pace. There is no one who can give you his gait, you must find it. You discover many things: your speed, the strength of your legs, what is the right length of your step. You are forced to be yourself.
You can not pack a suitcase and take the whole house with you, you need to take the essentials, what matters and that you can need and start walking. You have to travel light.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been walking and I haven’t thought about all these things. A lot has happened in my life lately, and it’s come back to me. A feeling of a long time ago when I put the essentials in my school backpack and left home without knowing what I would experience during the day with all the unconsciousness of a teenager. Without thinking about the after, without worrying about it. Leaving the house without thinking about when I would return, meeting the endless possibilities of a new adventure. In those days below I remembered the length of my pace and the strength and limitations of my legs experienced many times on steep slopes. I got away with it.
Then I grew up and forgot. I planned the future (even too much), I put aside unconsciousness, I brought with me many things, too many things and in the end I put down roots. I became an adult by all conventional standards. With good work, a home, bills to pay and responsibilities. And then I became sad. A strange oppressive sadness that seemed to me constant, normal. I wasn’t unhappy with my life, there was nothing that really didn’t work and yet something was missing. What?
There ‘take over many people who tell you the phrase that can be the epitaph on your tombstone while you are still alive: “Resign, this is the life of adults”. And why should one study like crazy, commit, run towards a goal and then discover that the goal is this? Are we kidding? “Then why did I try so hard?” “So I could choose”, “Choose what?” “The job you want to do, right?”
No, it just doesn’t add up. I don’t want to choose just work, I want to choose my life, the man to be with or not to be with, the house, the nation, friends, colleagues, work and how to be. Especially I want to choose how to be. So I filled a backpack with the essentials. Inside I put the people that matter, the beautiful part of my work (only that), the hope of a love story and I left.
Traveling light with your own pace, you happen to stumble but if you catch your breath, there is always another view to discover.
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