You Can't Hide from Yourself

03/14/2023 - Rishikesh, India

I packed my things and left Varanasi in the night. I had gotten used to the comfort of stillness, the ease of returning to my hotel room each night. The moment I stepped outside with my backpack it all dawned on me again. “Wow, I really have no idea what I’m doing.” The motion destabilizes your sense of security. Your standard of living falls again to primitive levels. All you need is water, food, and a little bit of shelter. You don’t even need a blanket when you’re this deep in the trenches. You lay down underneath a bench if that’s the only place with shade in the midday sun. You adjust, you survive in extreme conditions. These moments are the most difficult while backpacking, but they are also the most important.

The road is a dangerous place to be. Hours of nothingness but the terror of your thoughts and the occasional distraction of a book or the numbness of sleep. Your humiliations of the past are revisited, this time with refined and painfully accurate detail. You see, with clarity, the moments in your life where your path changed for the worse. There is no one to console you on the road. The light distractions are inadequate. You’re forced to look deep into the darkness of your life. You can’t hide from yourself. I’ve become familiar with the road. It has illuminated my missteps and allowed me to gather my footing. Today’s train ride has been just that. There has been no socializing, just deep internal warfare. It pulls a thin blanket of melancholy over you. I have enough experience to know that there is a strong upside to this. It is the painful shedding of the Self. Growing pains. I see where I need to go. We needed this rain.

I arrived in Rishikesh at 6:00pm. There is a vibration here. A good one. A positive one. It is a very popular travel destination for both Indians and foreigners alike. It is the yoga capital of the world. It’s no surprise that I have seen more white people here than I have anywhere else in India. Whenever I cross paths with a white person, we both pretend like we don’t notice each other. It is a very bizarre thing. I think part of it is that I don’t look very welcoming. Perhaps they can tell I’m not a hippie. But the more likely reason is that we would both spoil the illusion of being the black sheep. Our sense of individuality is attacked when we realize there are others just like us. Sometimes I will give or receive a head nod. That’s a simple, unspoken acknowledgement:

How about all of this? Pretty wild, huh?

Mhm.

I’ve got plenty of time to think long and hard about what I’ve done.

My rickshaw driver recruiting more passengers for the ride to Rishikesh. That’s why I'm up front.

The landscape has changed. Still the Ganges River. Very holy.

The gas tank was in my lap. That backpack is all I have with me.

First taste of Rishikesh.