This month, my kind editor has requested me to write about ‘something positive’. Given the year 2020 has been, I understand it. We want to hang on to a hope that the way we divide time—in hours, in minutes, days, months and years—must affect events. From one calendar year to another, we wish to be happier, safer. Healthier.
Cocooned in my privilege of not having to know all that’s going on in the world, I’d switched off my social media for December. This landed me in a weird mindspace of not-knowing—I usually keep in touch with the news via Twitter, and witness what’s on the minds of friends, family (and relative strangers) via Facebook. For an entire month, silence.
This silence, a state of ‘ignorance is bliss’, has in some ways allowed a focus on myself in ways that were lost to me. My health. Family. Home. Cooking. Reading. Writing. Walks. While reading has always been a safe space over the decades, and writing a compulsion, I’ve come to realise that walking can also open a corridor to sanity. There’s meditation in each step, should you pay attention to it, if you try and bring yourself back to your breath as you move: each step, in-breath, out-breath, step again.
An exercise for the body and a massage for the inner being all at once. Strolls have brought new pleasure. The much-spoken-about joy of noticing the small things. The way a road curves in a series of arcs. Weeds by the highway, flowering. Tiny butterflies no bigger than my nail flitting among them. Snails sliming their way onto mossy walls. Beetles and birdcalls, big and small. Dewdrops lingering on spiderwebs in stray sunlight. A dog panting up at its owner, all adoration, frolic, eagerness.
These are (poetic but undeniable) reassurances. The small things that go right, the creatures and people about their business, the security of knowing I’m also a link in all of this, in interaction with them. That I’m a part of the picture in other people’s eyes. The world goes on, despite humanity’s cumulative attempts at destroying it. We are getting a lot of things right.
Walks, of course, can be metaphorical as well as real. A walk down memory lane, for instance. If I choose lanes with care, I can stumble upon scattered pieces of brightness while browsing through old photos of family and friends. Each sepia photo is a time machine. On some days, they lead to walks into byways of the imagination, where I gain a different understanding, and give people known and unknown, new stories. A fresh perspective on myself and those who have been around me.
The Austrian holocaust survivor, psychiatrist, and author Viktor E Frankl once said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Notice that he does not speak of happiness, but of growth and freedom. In our comfort zones are old stories, our learned experiences. It is possible to re-invent them.
In 2021, we may not be able to drastically change the stimuli we’re surrounded with, but we can change our responses. Be it in memory, or imagination, or in everyday life, the answer to positive change might lie in something as simple as a walk.
Damyanti Biswas Twitter: @damyantig
Author and activist