Dear L,
I was on a bike for about two months on a trip through Scandinavia. It was a lot of fun and some discomfort. But during my trip I had some glimpse of a type of loneliness that I never felt before; it's the kind of loneliness that arise from experiences so very detached that almost no-one around you can relate to it, at least not to a degree you are hoping for. During my trip through Norway, I met a lot of people on their bikes, and we almost spoke our own language; a language that includes words such as climb, fog, wind, tunnel, calorie, gapahuk etc. It is just easy to talk about a climb with someone who just climbed it. The times when I wasn't around people where there were no other bike tourers, it was mildly suffocating. It was like holding in a barrage of experiences that I couldn't talk about; the random person I met probably never felt the cold air in a tunnel, or cold sweat on a windy day, to no fault of their own, obviously. But I wanted to talk about all of it, even about the nothingness of the road.
Before I started the trip, I was worried that being alone would be isolating, but about halfway I realised I barely noticed being alone, even though the majority of my time I was alone. When I wasn't alone, I naturally ended up talking with cyclists I came across, but I was slightly miserable in big towns. I could strike up a conversation with strangers, but I couldn't talk about the road behind or the road ahead. Either I lack the language to express, describe and talk about it or maybe the experience is remote enough to be indescribable in regular language. I suppose it's not unlike many other activities; alpinists, for example, probably also have a similar predisposition.
The most notable part about such a journey is its length and how unimportant it becomes eventually. The effects & experiences associated with the length is the hardest to talk about. The rest of the technicalities, I can probably do a reasonable job talking about, at least to any cycling adjacent person. Before I left Hamburg, I would close my eyes and see open roads & endless skies; it had reached a point where I couldn't ignore it anymore. I imagined an epic life-changing trip over land.
I remember a book about Zen Buddhism that my Father brought home. Even though it was in Bengali, the book was written in a very obscure language; the paragraphs & chapters didn't make any sense. In my blunt interpretation, it almost always hovered over the idea of nothingness or emptiness. None of it made any sense to me because my way of framing it was coloured by the way I knew how to gauge ideas. I would compare worthiness of an idea with their perceived value, or in some case, the anti-value. For example, study hard otherwise you end up in squalor, exercise if you want to live longer. These were reasonably valid advice and to me the pattern was clear. But Zen buddhism didn't fit in any of it. When I thought of my trip being epic and life-changing, it made me get out of my home, but I missed the point of being on a "journey". The more I think about it, the more I think it wasn't a trip but a pilgrimage of sorts, a pilgrimage to the ideas of Zen, however short lived that might have been. My trip was neither life-changing, nor epic. For the most part, it would look boring from the outside, apart from the occasional screaming in the wind. I saw a very few places that's worth writing or reading about. I didn't achieve anything remarkable. But on a few lucky days, I did flirt with nothingness. When the novelty of being on the road fades, when adventure (for the lack of a better word) becomes routine, all that is left is existence for the sake of the journey. On a few lucky days, I heard the wind, smelt the grass but felt nothing for a long moment. Granted, the simplicity of the road lends to it in a big way, but if you think about it, non-roadie life is not that different on those very lucky days; when we are not inundated by the tentacles of unhinged overconsumption.
How Severance makes a fetish of the office
Best,
A