Walking a straight line

The most important circle in Boudhanath – the one I walk clockwise as I do korwa – continuously separates worlds that couldn’t be more different.

The right-hand world evokes devotion, focus, surrender. The left-hand world offers a garland of merchants patiently arranged like vultures awaiting their chance to feed. And the path I walk carves a line between these worlds. 

Right and left, clean and dirty, Shiva and Shakti, Yang and Yin, masculine and feminine.

Maybe to do korwa is to constantly fall towards the right, while the leftward pull prevents a catastrophic plummet to the center (where you would surely be incinerated).

Perhaps on this path, the only straight line to be found is in the absolute present moment. 

Stateless

For the next two days, I’m stateless. Each waypoint on this journey has felt like living in a tiny, isolated town.

In San Francisco, for six hours, I was a temporary citizen of the Air France LoungeTown. My world narrowed to the chair I sat in, the counter I sat at, the window I stared out of, the water dispenser I drank from, the buffet I ate from, and the bathroom I washed up in. LoungeTown was a collection of transients, with its population growing and diminishing in waves, as citizens arrived and departed. All the characters you would expect to see in a town showed up at one time or another: the grumpy old man, the boisterous town drunk, the harried young mother, the unruly child, the kind-hearted server, the leering middle-aged man. Whenever a citizen who held a role departed, another one would eventually show up and assume the role just vacated.

The next town I moved to was KAL-Flight26 Town. This town does not like wanderers. It enforces this preference using an army of identically dressed, kind-but-firm women. They all wear implements in their hair that could be transformed into weapons against a citizen uprising. With this town, my world narrowed even further. I had my own little bed, customized with whatever I packed to make my little corner bearable for 12+ hours. I had kind neighbors – one woman in particular often smiled at me, and she did yoga after sleeping. Maybe she would be my new single-serving best friend, if I hadn’t been so tired. This town does not grow and diminish in waves – it is a steady-state town with a chaotic beginning and an abrupt ending, where everyone leaves together in an anxious rush.

Sometimes, the journey between towns is exciting and energizing. I don’t recall a lot about my transit to my current town. The memory is a haze of bureaucracy, stale smells, and fluorescent lights. Now I am in KAL-DarkLounge Town. When I arrived at 5 AM, the existing citizens had already demonstrated how this town rolls: all the lounge chairs were pulled together to create replicas of the bed I had in KAL-Flight26 Town. There was one more set of chairs left in the darkest corner, so I dutifully fashioned the expected configuration – added earplugs, my alpaca wrap, and my pillow – and was able to get a few more hours of sleep. This town is drowsy and resigned. Outside of this town is a humming lounge full of exhausted people and mediocre food. I think I’ll stay in this town for a few more hours and then go explore the airport.

In my experience, the more I have worked with my mind, the easier it has become to travel long hours. But a side effect of this work is a strange sense of disconnection, as I effortlessly become a citizen in the towns along the way. I feel as if it’s been weeks since I was home.