Walking In The Deafening Silence

I’m not sure if anything can prepare your feet for being clobbered into sad nubbins for sixteen days straight, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try out some longer jaunts in my hiking boots.

I shoehorned my first walk between the end of my work day at 4pm and dinner at 7pm. This initial walk was unladen – just me in a pair of jeans, in my boots, with some snacks and a water bottle. I charged with gusto up the steep hill behind my house, strode purposefully through Marda Loop, and positively marched to Glenmore Reservoir, where I allowed myself a short three-minute rest on a bench. The sun was sinking low over the winter mountains to the west. The lake was iced over and sparkling. The huge, old-timey paddle boat used by Heritage Park was tucked in the pine trees. I took all of this in for a short moment before sailing out of there. Fourteen kilometres and two podcasts later, I was home. A productive, successful outing indeed.

A few days later, I met a friend for coffee. She asked me, wide-eyed, what I was going to do while I walked every day for hours on my trip. I couldn’t help myself – I initially laughed. But she seemed serious, I contemplated it further. I suppose I would listen to music, or more podcasts, I said. But, she pointed out, even with an external charger, I would need to be careful with my phone battery so I could access my offline map. She seemed concerned for me, clutching her own phone to the base of her throat like a newborn kitten.

I mean, she was right. Maybe I would just have to walk in silence. Could I just walk in silence? Once the thought was thought, it couldn’t be un-thought.

I decided to make my second walk not only longer, but free of distractions to prepare me for the silence. 

This time I loaded up my small hiking backpack with two of my husband’s massive physiotherapy textbooks titled Orthopaedic Physical Assessment and Vestibular Rehabilitation. I liked the metaphor of humping the weight of his education through a forest at dawn.

The following morning, two hours after dawn (my romantic ideals rarely come to pass), I started my Strava counter and strode off into the crunchy, frosty canyon that is Fish Creek Park. Coyotes darted between trees. Ducks quacked. There were few people around, and the air was crisp and cool and still.

And yet, I was incredibly uncomfortable. 

Physically, I was fine. But internally, I was far, far away from that peaceful place. My mind squirmed in the quiet, having nothing to attach to and nowhere to direct its attention. It tried to make plans and tell stories – tried to distract me the same way my Instagram feed distracts me, with frenetic, unrelated crap. Shut up, shut up, shut up, I told it sternly, trying to drown out my thoughts with louder thoughts. Talk about an exercise in futility.

Inside my rib cage my heart hopped around anxiously, for no discernable reason. I felt an overwhelming urge for this to be over with, as if I was late for something. But I had nowhere else to be. As I walked further, I started to feel like a child who has been dragged to a big boring department store – time moved so slowly. I was itchy and frustrated.

There was a point where I stopped and purposefully let out a ragged huff, to release some of the energy. I was sick of fighting against this inner crabby kid who was having a silent, but powerful, meltdown. When I started moving again, I made a decision: if I was feeling anxious, urgent, and desperate for something else to fill my mind, then so be it. That was just the way I was going to feel. It was less of a welcoming, and more of a deflation.

It took a while, but finally, instead of sitting at the front of my eyeballs (to borrow a delightful turn of phrase from my friend T), the feeling absorbed into my bones. I did an exercise I had read about but hadn’t tried, where you name four things you see, three things you hear, two things you smell, and one thing you taste. 

I saw the semi-frozen river, a cloud shaped like a crocodile, a golden retriever, and a fisherman. 

I heard a chattering crow, two people laughing ahead of me, and the rumble of distant traffic.

I smelled boggy spring grass and metallic snow.

I tasted coffee on my breath.

Slowly, slowly, I felt calmer. 

The urgency and anxiety didn’t go away completely, but it dissipated enough to provide some relief. You’re here, I told myself. You don’t have to be anywhere else. You don’t have to do anything else. This is what you’re doing. And it’s lovely.

Later, after I walked my bruised feet back to my car, I still felt untethered by the emotional and mental discomfort I had experienced. I’ve read a lot about people’s growing dependence on online stuff – an increasing tendency to avoid boredom, sadness, and uncertainty simply by distracting ourselves with videos, articles, images, anything. Poor those people, I’ve thought every time I encountered the subject.

Hardy har, I say now, slapping my knee in mirth. It turns out the joke is well and truly on me.

Honestly, from the moment this solo trip entered, unbidden, into my mind in January, I have felt equally enamoured by it and resistant to it. The enamoured aspect has a moth-drawn-to-a-flame quality. I cannot look away from the temptation of what promises to be quite a slog. I want to feel what it’s like to do something like this. I believe and imagine I can do it, but untested, there’s no way to know. There’s something extremely tantalizing about throwing myself into the midst of it, to find out.

On the other hand, there is the resistance. 

To hardship, perhaps. To discomfort, or failure, or the mysterious ghosts and ghouls waiting to emerge from the crevices of my mind once I cast off. It’s almost as if a wiser self is observing my current, less-mature self, knowing that yes, it will be hard, but not necessarily in the ways I expect it to be hard. Walking in silence seems to be one of those things. So, heck, I may just walk the whole thing in silence. It feels like the right thing to do.

S. started calling this journey my “spirit quest” in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, but I’ve started to adopt this term as a more robust description of how I’m approaching it. It feels like something I’ll remember for a long time. Somewhere out there, the Highway of Intention turns off at Happenstance Alley, and this is where I like to be. 

It feels something like synchronicity.

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