These Walks of Mine...

On Tuesday night, after about yet another twelve hours of sleep (in two six-hour parts), I decided to do what I haven't done for a very long time - but should have ages ago, considering my current state of mind. Walking in the dark, as I like to call it, is one of my favorite things to do, and it's been high up on the "best in life" list for as long as I can remember. There aren't many things it can be compared with, mostly because it's a unique experience in itself, and also since its impact can be incredibly far-reaching.
In contrast with more common daytime walks, these nocturnal expeditions aim to be a wholly anonymous event, eliminating every possible human interference from outside, erasing the barrier between the surroundings and yourself, and that way temporarily forming something close to the hypothetical "state of nature", a concept that would in all its ridiculousness be much more suitable for describing the likely state of mind of this night-time stroller.
The unparalleled combination of factors was nearly perfect for its purpose - I intended to go out to think through a number of things currently on my mind... and hopefully condense them somewhere along the way, perhaps even find a fil rouge beneath that shroud of disorder.

Not mistaking it for a solitary activity of a sociopath, the act of night walking predominantly serves as a refreshment, a welcome and exciting change in whatever one is doing - let's face it, there's few things like it.
In accordance with the latter and to reveal my visible disappointment that has surmounted over all these years, being able to find occasional peace like that is and has always been the single positive thing this place I live in has to offer, so I can be thankful for at least this one thing (though it can in the best case only provide a pale shadow of its equally desired vibrant opposite, such deviation from the original topic would prove to be more confusing than anything else).

While the topic of night walking isn't something I would until recently share with anyone in such a manner, I do have to say that I sometimes wonder how many people actually practice a similar thing - I have a hunch there are only a handful. Not just because I haven't met any on my own outings, the main reason is that it must seem pretty out of the ordinary to the average person.
That is one of the reasons why I haven't tried "sharing" the walks yet... on one hand, there are no such people around to like it, and it would undoubtedly alter the experience in yet unknown ways on the other. Although, I have to admit, this is exactly what would probably make it that all the more interesting.


The Walk in The Dark

The timing I set out in that cold windy night was ideal for a walk: crystal clear skies and shiny moon without a single living soul anywhere in sight. A gust of chilly northern wind blew directly into my face as I stepped out of the safe shelter of village and headed up towards the pastures, contemplating my next course of action.

The first thing on my mind was doubt. As with everything else, it was a necessity for me to doubt the purpose of walking itself. Everyone battles their own demons, and this obsession with questioning "all there is" certainly represents one of mine.
I tried to figure out if and why is this inner dialogue (not monologue) that I was about to get into more effective than the usual, outer one - conversing with another human being. I always found dialogues to be more productive and inspiring than a continuous, linear flow of information. That is why I came to imagine ad hoc entities, existing only as long as they are required and then silently disintegrating back into dark corners of my mind. They can be shaped to perfectly suit your requirements - it is their greatest advantage and also their biggest flaw. In contrast with converser from flesh and blood, the internal dialogue is exclusively dependent and therefore limited to information stored in various ways in one's own mind, which has limited ways of relaying and interpreting it, thus greatly influencing one's conclusions.
Exposing yourself to external influences is therefore the key to finding better solutions and generally a better investment for draining your brain's resources. Unfortunately, live conversations are uncontrollable situations, prone to impending doom of quickly rising entropy, ultimately leading to chaos.
This is where an inner dialogue comes in handy - it's the ability to have peace and quiet - and still get to meaningful conclusions at the same time. Furthermore, the nocturnal natural ambient contributes to just the right mood as well, it is actually an essential piece of the puzzle to make this special state of mind flourish, particularly with its emotional component.
Needless to say, this last heavily influential element, an interplay of memories and notions, stretching all the way to my early childhood, is quite likely the determining factor behind my decisions to go out in the first place. What exactly is so appealing from that point of view?

In a way, walking in the quiet darkness feeds my imagination's appetite for post-apocalyptic scenarios, the so-called Armageddon effect in which you are allowed to think to be (one of) the last surviving member(s) of humanity after a disaster of cataclysmic proportions. Cataclysmophilia itself, as I would call my obsession with this idea, is a worthwhile reason for going out.

It also gives you a feeling of playing a role-playing game, it particularly reminds me of the enchanting Diablo night scenes with its serene music, and of course the original Gothic. You, an anonymous individual, all alone in the desolate wild, are left to pit your wits and will against nature's fury (if I rephrase 300), thus getting a clear existential purpose.

As I crossed a meadow, stepping over mice hole-ridden terrain among patches of frozen grass, occasional looks at the sky reminded me how I used to undergo "you are nothing" moments, especially in early high school, a palette of universal magnitude-related realizations that brought me on edge of despair with tears in my eyes when I grasped in all its extent (or so I thought) how endlessly small fraction of this cosmos I represent, which actually pushed me a bit closer to insanity and robbed me of any serious attempts to make my life meaningful, luckily only for a while.
This time a somewhat different kind of thoughts swept through my mind: even if you are virtually nothing when compared to the great beyond, you in here and now (if only for a moment) are everything, what your eyes perceive only exists because of You, the sole purpose and legitimizer of its existence, the beholder of encircling still nature, the snowy mountains in the distance, the moon and stars up above... oh what a blissful, naive thing to think! An egocentric trance and nothing more - yet in that moment, it seemed perfectly fitting.

I moved to a wooden outpost, formerly a hunting observation point, weighing various thoughts and arranging them, having occasional flashes of my recent readings. When I rambled onward after about ten minutes, streaking into the forest, my conscious embrace of night walking reached its peak and neither a suspicious car in the forest nor the mesmerizing echoing of owl's screech could throw me off balance, out of my nightly groove. Truly, it was an exhilarating feeling, one that in the short term gives you a climactic feeling and in the long term helps you anchor back in the real world.

Now I dared to answer the question from the beginning: where exactly do you want to go?
My responsive was lucid, if somewhat Pythian. No matter what happens, I want to venture along the path that will lead me precisely where I will be able to return right here, right now at any time... this moonlit land of serenity, wherever it may truly lie.
I have always envisioned such a place... high wavy grass, silent warm silent night with only crickets playing their tune, a single dusty winding road cutting through the plains...


Such was my nighttime walk, with some details and thoughts left omitted. But its essence is here, more or less successfully captured in the form of this blog post. Looking back makes me realize how I failed to address the overall value and impact of strolling around in the dark... nonetheless, you should get a pretty good picture with a little help of imagination.