11. Walkabout

[deathpixie]

Greg was successful. He had a good job which earned him plenty of money and gave him personal satisfaction, a loving wife, two happy and healthy children. He owned a nice house in the suburbs and had a boat that he would take out on summer weekends. He played squash with some work colleagues, ate healthily and enjoyed hosting barbeques and dinner parties for his friends.

Life, it seemed, was perfect.

Then one day, Greg woke up, packed some things in an old backpack he'd had since his student days and left. He walked down the path to the front gate, out through it, and then down the street. The only message he left his family was a note scrawled on the whiteboard they used for shopping lists and reminders:

Gone for a walk.

Greg walked all day, eventually leaving the city behind him. When he got too tired to walk any more, he found a quiet corner in a park and slept, using his pack as a pillow. He awoke at dawn, drank some water and ate an apple he had in his pack. Then he continued walking. He walked all that day too, and found another place to sleep when the sun went down.

This continued over the next several months. Greg would walk until he was tired and then he would sleep. When he was hungry, he would stop and offer to do an hour or two's work in return for a meal. Some people accepted the trade. Some didn't. When they didn't, Greg would simply smile, give them a nod, and move on. His hair and beard grew long and scraggly. His clothes became worn and tattered and he had to replace his shoes several times as they wore clean through. He was sunburned and weatherbeaten, bitten by frosts and baked by the heat, tired and often hungry, but still Greg walked on.

He walked through countries where the languages and customs were strange to him, where people dressed differently and stared at him as if he were from another planet. He trod the plains of Manitoba, the cobbled streets of London, dodged traffic in New York, hiked over the Alps and down along the valley of the Nile. Eventually, the media got word of Greg's walk - he had become a legend among travellers, a tale told on holiday blogs and passed on in chain emails. Reporters searched for him and his history, but whenever one tracked him down, he would politely nod and continue on his way without saying anything.

In Tibet, he was asked where he was walking to.

Greg simply smiled and said: "Nowhere. I just like walking."

At that, the man had snorted and said that he was either very crazy or very holy. Perhaps both, since they were sometimes the same.

Greg had laughed at that. And then he had hitched up his pack, thanked the man for his meal, and walked off down the road. He didn't really know what it was he was looking for, but he was sure that when he found it, he would know.

In the meantime, he would just keep on walking.

This post was originally posted to my Dreamwidth journal.