The body acclimates, grows strong. At a certain point on a long walk, the kind of walk where you clock twenty or thirty or forty kilometers a day, day after day—and you get into that rhythm of waking, walking, working, sleeping—you realize that the body is just a machine. You feed it and it turns that feed into steps. The cerebellum does its thing.

The last time I saw you we were seniors in high school, walking opposite directions down the street. A street we had walked together countless times. We said hello, but it was obvious that we were both embarrassed. We lacked the emotional intelligence to bridge the fissure.

“Now is the time to visit all the celebrated places in the country and fill our heads with what we have seen, so that when we become old and bald, we shall have something to talk about over our teacups,” so begins Thomas Satchell’s translation of one of the most famous literary accounts of walking in Japan—Shank’s Mare.

The sort of emptiness only revealed when you leave the smallness of your hometown, see the greater world, feel your own void amplified in the abundance of others.

We cheers our coffees and he says, You know where that comes from, aye—the Brits, pewter mugs, and slammin’ ’em together so a wee bit of my ale goes into yours and yours into mine and we know there’s no poison in either one.

Building on a courage you gave me simply by existing, I began cultivating an independence to set off far away without a map or guidance, praying a mind could be reconfigured. Feeling the tininess of my heart as I hit the road. Feeling constricted by that. Wanting to expand it, to do better. Wanting to show all of them how it could be.

I put on Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” just to lighten the mood and it only makes me more confused, leaves me marveling at how this incredible recording had been made inside a penitentiary, how this beautiful music could also be so cursed, how all the men whoop and holler when he says he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

I’ve come to crave the solitude and asceticism of these solo walks. There is no quieter place on earth than the third hour of a good long day of walking. It’s alone in this space, this walk-induced hypnosis, that the mind is finally able to receive the strange gifts and charities of the world. If that sounds like woo-woo nonsense, it feels even

I stroll picturesque stream-flanked ippon-uras and watch kids walk before me in zigzaggy lines and think about how adults are so point-to-point specific, but these children try their hardest to stretch out their walks home, ducking into little nooks in the entryways of houses and behind stone walls, poking one another, tugging on tree branches,