Walking

I have walked a great deal. I do not know whether there is such a thing as “too much.” Perhaps there is a “too much” when, through walking, you come to understand that you no longer need anything at all.

I have always been searching for the essential. All my personal belongings—including my backpack and my tent—weigh only 9 kilograms. When I set out at nineteen, I was carrying about 22 kilograms. A few years ago, I reached this goal of 9 kilograms, and in that moment I felt freer than ever. Many solitary walks. Twenty-five days alone in southwest Tasmania, then sixteen days at over 4,500 meters in the Tian Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan. Difficult terrain, weather conditions that were sometimes unpredictable. Using maps, valleys, and mountains to find direction; searching for water; finding a sheltered place to pitch the tent; scanning the sky to understand whether a storm would break over me. Alone. Just me and my ability to be there. You forget everything. The senses become extraordinarily sharp—you hear sounds, not noise; humidity has depth, while the wind has a taste. The body moves on its own, strong, seemingly invincible. The sun and the moon become your friends. They give the rhythm, and you only have to follow it. True hunger is felt only after three or four days. Food is rationed. Hard ascents and steep descents. The cold.

This place is not there for you; it exists for itself. You are a guest. Being there is an honor. When I think about it, I am moved to tears of joy. Thank you, rainy mountains of Tasmania; thank you, dry and steep peaks of Western Australia; thank you, glaciers of Central Asia. Thank you, rainforests of Laos; thank you, majestic wadis of Oman; the immense valleys of central Iran; Lake Baikal of the shamans. Thank you for allowing me to be there. Alone. Naked. Small.

The ego falls silent, and the world speaks.

You immediately understand what your place is. When you ask whether your thoughts matter, whether your feelings, your problems, your existence matter—the answer is: nothing. They matter not at all in the face of this. And so returning to the artificial world where human beings are said to matter, to be important, does not interest me. I do not like it. I find it a lie. I no longer even take seriously my own possible problems, supposedly rooted in some lack or some past. What importance do they have? What importance do I have, when set against such magnificence? So what do I do? Forget what I have lived and return to living within the human lie? We are not important. I am not important.

Then I think of mountains cut and tortured so that machines can reach their decapitated summits; valleys violated by asphalt; rivers and lakes treated with violence.

And if before I did not want to continue the lie, now I also feel shame.

Shame at being human.

The shame I feel toward humanity is a pain born of love. That is why I speak of love and of being loved.

For this reason, when you continue to speak of my father and my wounds, I feel that you have not understood me. I do not matter, and what I call sadness is the melancholy of returning to walk.

And perhaps the melancholy I call “the sadness of returning to walk” is the nostalgia for truth.

For me, walking is not an escape: it is a return.

And so I feel trapped in this intermediate space—too awake for the lie, too human to remain away forever.

Nostalgia for truth. That is what it is. It is not depression, it is not childhood trauma. It is the pain of those who have seen the true order of things and must then return to the theater.

There was a time when the West believed in a promise that united individuals, that transformed fear into freedom and solitude into community.

Rousseau called this the social contract: a pact founded on trust, reason, and the general will.

Citizens renounce part of their rights in order to receive security and justice, to live under the same law.

That contract is broken. Today, the institutions that should protect instead serve other powers. Freedom has been reduced to consumer choice. Community has dissolved, and we live in digital solitude.

As Rousseau feared: chains everywhere.

Nietzsche predicted that when comfort replaces courage, we will become the “last men.”

Docile, satiated, without purpose. We have everything except meaning.

The way we live is not the only possible one. Among the Bedouins and the Australian First Nations, I have seen a different model: dispersed yet united, without written laws, but with an order born of human and natural rules.

The binding power of one’s given word, respect for the guest, reciprocity, immediate justice. Every individual matters—not as part of an abstract state, but as what Rousseau called a state of nature. Nietzsche would have described their freedom as lived, not granted—able to affirm themselves without moralism.

We, instead, chose a contract. The word became a signature; trust was replaced by procedure. Contracts have lost their value, and we find ourselves alone and defenseless.

The future is not a return to the past. The future is not forgetting the past. It is remembering what we have forgotten: that community is not born from codes, but from mutual recognition.

Recognizing everyone, without exclusion.

And it is here that my problem with colonization and the aftermath of Western civilization begins.

Australia—Terra Nullius, land of no one, land of freedom.

That land had been cared for by free peoples for thousands of years.

The West brought “freedom,” replacing the natural freedom of these peoples with a social contract. A century has passed. The contract is broken, and the memory of the past is fading.

The First Nations of the world once knew the way. And we are losing it, just as we are losing the mountains, the rivers, and the valleys that sustain us.

Perhaps Nietzsche was right: we have become the “last men.”

I do not believe that the lack of family roots must universally generate pain in every human being. The concept of family has changed greatly throughout human history. The image of the “happy family” is a creation of modern marketing.

Of course, I do not deny that human beings are social animals and that community is important. Community is not synonymous with family.

As I explained, that is precisely what I am searching for. And as I argued in the second part, the community into which I was born follows a broken contract that is leading to self-destruction.

I go to these places not to forget, but to find; not to erase, but to create. The issue is not silencing pain, but feeling the joy of being where my community should exist.