□ Placeholder: 15 — Sandakphu

Phew! That was a long hiatus.

But I'm here now. We are here now. In this new normal — a phrase that I have still not grown accustomed to and yet I hear it everyday in some form or the other.

Hope you're well and doing relatively(?) better.

I'm sat at my desk and it's a cold morning here in Amsterdam. It has been snowing since last week. But before you begin to worry too much about me—fear not!—it's important to note that despite my feet being cold and my focus wandering all over the darn place, I've drunk at least a gallon of coffee and propped up in front of me is Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses. The book is like a warm hug from a person that you're somehow sure of loosing in days to come. You want to focus on the feeling of the warm hug yet can't help but think how you're going to feel once they are gone.

It's a truly lovely book and it taunts me with its loveliness. I'm glad I'm reading it in this cold weather because I could use a warm hug.

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Last month, my brother and I completed a short walk in the Eastern Himalayas that ended at Sandakphu — a peak, roughly about 12,000 ft, at the edge of Singalila National Park in Nepal.

The goal of the walk was to just…. walk. And read after the walk. “It is the precise bite and feel and sound of every step that fills me with life,” writes Peter Matthiessen in his phenomenal book The Snow Leopard.

I had done this walk, maybe 12 years ago and one image stuck since after. After the long day of walk, I was standing on the edge of a ridge, in the clean air and absence of all sound, looking at a seemingly even and vast sheet of white clouds, covering the horizon as far as the eyes could see. Twelve years later, I was seeing exactly how I had that image locked in my memory.

Science says memory fools us. Probably the image was something more than a memory. Maybe it was a feeling. Feeling of a kid looking at the vastness of nature, subdued by the reminder of insignificance. The courage-to-be, right there and then and nowhere else. The feeling of becoming one with the nature. “Feel,” you see, can’t fool us.

However, the walk took a toll on both of us. Not sure of the nature of the mental toll yet, but we felt defeated physically at the end of the walk. It was supposed to be an easy walk but on the last day our knee decided to give up on us. It was especially embarrassing for me because in some way I let me and him down. The silver lining to this was encouraging though, and in his words it was: What doesn't kill us, makes us stronger.

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The lockdown and the pandemic in general has made me a bit more self-aware. When you awaken to a new level of self-awareness, the first phase is incredibly uncomfortable. Because you can see what you couldn’t see before — and what that usually looks like is paying witness to some sort of shitty behaviour that you were previously doing unconsciously that has now come into consciousness. And at first, all you can do is watch. Watch yourself doing the shitty or self-destructive or hurtful behaviour.

Gradually you are in the acceptance phase and then you begin to take restock of things and behaviours, evolving them, eliminating them as and when necessary. To put simply, you just start... noticing. And that is the essence of whatever it is that we are doing here. Being present, noticing.

This should always have been the normal. There's no new normal.

Until next time,

— K