My month in the mountains — and three gifts that just keep giving
Ten years ago, when Prashanth and I started dating, we asked each other the standard questions. Do you like kids? Do you start your day with tea or coffee? Do you like beaches more or mountains? We aligned easily on the first two: we both love kids in general but don’t want to have any of our own; we love coffee (I used to have mine with milk and sugar, he preferred black, and now that’s how I like it too). On the beach vs mountain question, Prashanth said that well, he liked both, but he had a slight preference for beaches. And I said oh how nice that I too, liked both, but I had a slight preference for mountains. We may have basked a bit in the warmth of how compatible we were.
But I was lying. To be fair to me, I did not know I was lying. I was enamoured with the boy and so keen to impress him that I wasn’t able to see my heart’s honest truth. My preference for mountains is not slight. I like the mountains infinitely more than beaches. I now feel very bad about the possibility that I may have married Prashanth under false pretences. Oh well.
I have just come back from spending a little over a month in *undisclosed location*, a gorgeous village-town in the Himalayas. Beaches are great, but let’s be honest, can a beach make you feel alive the way mountains can make you feel? I’m so much more aware of my body when I’m in the mountains. Lungs, heart, muscles in the leg, muscles in the back — everything works hard and loves it. Nothing can expand my awareness of my breath, of my being alive, than climbing a steep slope, inhaling the scent of pine trees, listening to birds and brooks.
The name itself — Himalayas — feels like a poem to me. When I’m there, not only does the world — and my self — feel perfectly right the way it is, but also both seem full of potential to become even more amazing. When I’m there, I find it easy to understand why so many writers live and write in the Himalayas. I savour the thought that I, too, could become a writer, until I remember that I already am a writer.
The place I lived in combines the best of many worlds. It is isolated enough to give solitude, but not so isolated that it’s harsh. It’s not Walden. I had access to hot water, my homestay people were kind enough to make me food once a day and clean my room once a week, and if I was willing to walk for up and down a steep slope (I was), I could get to cafes that serve over ten international cuisines (Italian and Israeli are the most popular for some reason).
There are so many gifts that *undisclosed location* gave me. Every day I got to walk through cloud-filled pine-trees for hours. I drank water from a waterfall. I got fitter and stronger. I managed to build a daily writing habit, which was my primary goal for the travel. Will the habit stick now that I am back? That is the million-dollar question I’m not going to try and answer, but I hope with all my heart that the answer will be yes. But these are all mini-presents. There are three belief-shifts — unexpected Mega-Gifts — for which I feel huge surprise and gratitude:
1. The monkeys are okay. Two years ago, at a mountain trail in Manali, a group of about twenty monkeys somehow decided I was a dangerous creature, swooped down from trees and blocked my path, screaming and baring their teeth at me. A kind stranger, wiser than me about mountains and monkeys, rescued me. Even without that experience, I’ve been terrified of monkeys for most of my life. In my very short list of Things I don’t Like About Mountains, Monkeys are item #1 (item #2 is clothes take so long to dry). When a dear friend was considering a weekend visit to my mountain hideout last month, her husband, who didn’t want her to leave, had an interesting thing to say: “You imagine you’re going to experience a mini-Switzerland. What you will actually experience is cow-poop on the walking trails and screaming monkeys and packs of wild dogs everywhere.” It made me laugh, but he had a point. I love walking alone, and I do meet dogs and monkeys on the way. But now I’ve become one of those people who walk nonchalantly beneath screeching monkeys and say hello to strange dogs. I no longer roll my eyes when people say that animals can sense your fear and if you’re not afraid, they will be calm too. I can now see and respect that the monkey is a center of her own world. She is as much a creature of this universe as I am and she has an equal right to be on the mountain. This sense of connection does not yet extend to bears though. I was told bears come out on the trails post-sunset, so I always came back in my room before it’s dark.
2. Minimalism is easy. To that friend who recently said that I “might be in an unhealthy relationship with amazon”, please stop smirking and hear me out. My homestay people gave me their best room. The room has three massive windows, one of which looks at gorgeous mountain face, the other two look into a valley filled colourful roofs like sailboats in a sea of green. It might just be the most amazing room on the mountain. It was also an extremely bare room. It had tables, two beds, and nothing else. One of the tables became my writing space and other became my storage space for clothes, coffee, and other life-essentials. It took me two days to learn two important truths. One, a woman cannot live by beauty alone, she also needs a few material things. And two, the “No-name Café” down the hill are the drop-points for courier deliveries for the twenty families who live on this mountain. Over the next two weeks, I filled up the room with a few things. An electric kettle. An Ikea shelf that hangs from the curtain rods and can hold clothes. Three colorful rugs. A floor lamp. A floor cushion. A hot plate. Pretty jars of salt and pepper. Candles. Pretty mugs and bowls. You get the drift. The list runs into exactly thirty-nine items. I shopped for some of these things at the nearest market town, which is a forty-minute walk away, but most were deliveries, prompting the lady at the No-name café to ask me if I was planning to get married on this mountain and accumulating my dowry. I’ve had to carry every single thing up four hundred steps on a fairly steep slope, so none of these was an impulse buy. Anytime I wanted something, the question was — do I want it badly enough to carry it up the mountain? And once I acquired those thirty-nine things, the answer was no. And so those thirty-nine objects are my definitive recipe for Minimalist Living Tinged with Some Minor Indulgence and Luxury. While on the minimalism topic, I want to talk about laundry too. For years I’ve been talking about wanting to wash clothes by hand to save water, but it was all talk. Up on the mountain, it became so easy to do because everyone else was doing it, and because the alternative was the forty-minute trek and back to the laundromats in the market town. It’s been about two weeks since I got back and I continue to wash clothes by hand. My conclusion is that a life in the Himalayas is the key to building good habits. A life in the Himalayas is the key to everything.
3. Magic is possible. I have been slow at adulting. For longer than I care to admit, I believed in magic of a certain kind: that there was a basic pattern to things, that if you were good and kind, good and kind things might happen to you. I did grow up eventually, and the day I saw the picture of Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach was the last time I believed in any possibility of a magical (or even vaguely rational) universe. But I do not enjoy this cynical adult life. I’ve been reading Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, trying to take tiny, fearful steps towards hope, looking for evidence that human existence might be more than a “vale of tears”.
, neatly paraphrasing Buddhism, says that our attention shapes our entire experience of the world. Could this mean that if I look very carefully, find something that looks a little bit like magic and pay laser-like attention to it, I could bring about some magic into my experience? I’ve been setting up experiments to test the hypothesis. In June, I described, in my journal, my “dream living and working space”. It was a very specific description: “a house on top of a hill, away from people and shops and busyness, near a river, large windows, some comforts like hot water” and so on. I then put up the description (and a couple of pictures) on the walls next to my desk. My room in *undisclosed location*, where I spent my month in the mountains (and where I hope to go again soon), fits the description of my dream space in every feature but one — it is not near a river. But it does have a dozen small streams, including one that was a four-minute walk away. I walked there twice a day to fill up my water bottles. I’m not changing my entire worldview based on this one happy accident of finding the perfect house on the mountain, however. My current placeholder definition of human existence is “valley of tears and injustice with some occasional sightings of magic”. For now, that is enough.