Everywhere and Nowhere
By: Drew Wilkinson
Tags: Personal, Camino De Santiago, Short Read, Walking, Nature

Elon Musk has a feel for words. In the opening of one of the tunnels for the hyperloop he compared traffic to “acid on the soul”. He wants us to get from A to B fast. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, or seem like a billionaire’s whimsical fancy. After all, he also wants us to work 80-hour weeks. To Musk, humans are productive units with economic value. Widgets on capitalism’s grand assembly line. Time spent travelling, or at any non-productive task, is inefficient. Edward Abbey wrote in Desert Solitaire: “The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated…To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever.”

I walked the Camino in 2017. It was roughly how I imagined it: long, hard, crowded in parts, and sometimes monotonous, but also beautiful and enlightening and wonderfully life-affirming. Walking simply for the sake of walking was the ultimate luxury. Every morning of my five-week hike, I woke up at dawn, packed up my few possessions, and hit the trail, with nothing else to do than make it to the next auberge. To me, the walking was profound and important. As Abbey said, “Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details.”

Since graduating in 2015: I have spent eighteen months in San Diego; walked the Camino; returned to Ireland for a year or so; and moved to Toronto where I currently live. Because of these moves, and my eagerness to make them, I’m increasingly fascinated by those who are content to spend their lives in one place. I wonder how they don’t grow tired of their surroundings, of their day-to-day, of the unavoidable sameness of one place. How can you understand the colossal scale of the world? How can you not feel trapped? Is there not some universal urge for motion, for migration, for change?

There is an alienating but exciting shift in perception that attends a semi-permanent move between countries. Suddenly, you view everything from a weird lens: You are not quite a tourist, but you are also not a local. It accentuates the more nuanced aspects of a society and, as a result, it’s easy to feel disconnected from it all like an anthropologist on an expedition. But over time it wanes until you realize that you were staring at individual paint strokes, not the painting. Then you experience a country all over again. This, for whatever reason, usually happens after you have left. You compare and you contrast and it’s like you are starting all over again with an entirely different perspective.

Several months ago, I was picking up ingredients for dinner at my local grocery store, a banal task, and I wondered what it would mean if I were instead in a Tesco or a Trader Joes or a Mercado somewhere in Spain. I also wondered if I was too eager to cut myself off from my origins, the product of a binational upbringing that didn’t feel particularly rooted in either Ireland or the US. I started to question my belief in the sanctity of changing environments, of cross-cultural experiences. What was I really gaining but a more muddled view of the world and of myself?

When I sat down to write this, I wanted to say something about the way that technology and globalization inhibit the ability to connect with a place. I still think this is true. Your attention is constantly pulled elsewhere, to an online world, to the past, to the future. And even if the hyperfocused disagree, globalization has created a certain cocoon of sameness wherever you go. But it was a failure, it was too academic. Having a clear idea of what you want to write can sometimes work against you. It becomes too factual, too emotionless, and you end up with nothing but frustration.

It was the Abbey quote that I kept wrestling with, coming back to it again-and-again. You move around, you are alone, you are in love, you make great friends, you drift apart, you do different jobs… There is this perpetual, dizzying motion. It’s hard to slow down, to observe the space between one point and another, to see between the cracks, to “join the dots”, and to cut ourselves off for a time so that we can reconnect. It’s easier than ever to feel like you are everywhere and nowhere.

Canada is a country that possesses an abundance of natural beauty. But ask Torontonians about this beauty and they will tell you to go out west, to the Rockies. I didn’t believe that a province as vast as Ontario was devoid of what I was looking for.

And what was it that I wanted? I started to feel this urgency, that I needed to get out into space and light and clarity, and away from the crowds and concrete of the city. There was a nebulous connection that had been severed. It sounds too New Age for my liking to say that this connection was with nature but I knew that it was true. I felt buried by the inescapable pulse of modern life. I wanted to get out from under my phone and computer and subway delays and brightly-lit supermarkets, if even for some momentary respite.

This urge was likely a product of my childhood, one spent immersed in nature. There was the Atlantic Ocean to one side. This meant Jellyfish and Hermit Crabs and endless summer beach days examining the tidepools of Tra Mhor. To the North of me was the bog. The ponds full of frogs, fields of bog cotton and gorse and heather, and in the summer, the bumblebees in the fuschia. Sometimes I played with my two brothers but I also delighted in being out in the relative wilderness alone, needing no better companionship than myself.

Childlike wonder is hard to regain. It’s difficult to flip a switch and to suddenly feel awe. It’s not a feeling that can be faked. I wonder though if it can be cultivated. If it starts with a more concerted and measured appreciation. I like to believe so. It’s about stopping to pay attention, shutting off the pull of constant and instant gratification. It’s diving a little deeper into specifics. It’s about finding that pure and simple enjoyment. This seems more urgent and necessary than ever before.

We rode the Parkbus to Elora Gorge. It was the third of several trips where my girlfriend and I went to conservation areas with trail maps and not much else. We joked that it was blue and green therapy. Elora though was when I started to be firmly “somewhere” again, enjoying the present. No vague annoyances, no gripes, no unfulfilled wishes, just happy as we walked and chatted and observed the kestrels circling high up above, the steep canyons on either side and the Grand River in motion below us, green and noisy. Everything else melted away. Lifting my face towards the warmth of the sun, there was no need to ask, “Where to now, Drew?”

I was where I needed to be.