Making a small path in a big city

I look out over Barcelona, perched beneath the trees that scatter the hills above the city. At first I feel like an intruder — a city dweller who awkwardly treads through the nature armed with my plastic pens, papers, and programming. Stumbling over uneven ground and getting poked by arid cactus plants. I sit, alone on the ground under a pine tree. At first I fear the chaos of this tiny slice of nature, I flinch violently as a bee lands on my knee scared of it stinging me… as if it will choose me as its enemy. I ponder if I am safe to leave my belongings and shut my eyes to meditate a bit. These small fears strangely brings me out of my troubled thoughts and allow me to connect to the present moment. I look over the city and watch. Still but bursting with the sounds of city life reverberating into the hills… “arrrrriba”, “amigo”.

Slowly, I begin to melt into the earth, the scutter of birds wings drown my thoughts, the loud buzzing of bumble bees distract me from my anxieties, the tickling zips of flies on my skin and the occasional bite from a stray ant investigating the giant human who sat in its path all bring me to earth. I no longer feel separate. I become part of the nature. The nature also merges with the city; the calls of people down below dance with the frantic sounds of insects, the whistles of Saturday sports matches become one with chirping of birds. I experience two worlds as one. I no longer see the city of manmade rigid building structures as unnatural and separate… just different forms of life and energy.

I impulsively check my phone. It has been one hour. A part of me starts to think about time. How long should I stay here? What else should I do today? I am aware of the thoughts but I choose to ignore them. I know I have been trained in deadlines, schedules, timetables and clocks. Time begins to melt. Its linearity becomes spherical. It doesn’t matter how long I stay, or when I go, or what I do for the rest of the day. The whole city is here, right now, for me to experience. The frequencies of its people and culture reverberating into my soul. Annihilating my individuality. I become both the city and the nature: complex contradictions of the same natural world in dualistic harmony. It is in this moment I decide to write down my experience. I feel compelled to express it as I don’t feel it is mine. It is ours. My privilege in this moment is my plastic pen, paper and my ability to express and share through my gift of conscious awareness… and these connective organisms we call “social media”.

My location stops being the natural hills at the back of a bustling city and the city becomes framed by the trees… a window from nature into humanity. Past, present and future compressed into an infinite picture. A picture that has no sense of time. Me, becoming the eyes of a cosmic intelligence marvelling at its beauty. All that was in the way of it was myself. The egotistical being that wandered into the hills to get some space and breathe in the air, bathe in the sunlight, touch the moist ground of the earth under the concrete city sidewalks, marvel at the stillness of the Mediterranean ocean waters… and get some space from my journey of life pressured by money, politics, opinions, tragedy, doubts and judgements.

Here, I realise everything is me and I am everything. That all we need to do to tap into the beauty of life is to stop long enough for it to show itself. It doesn’t matter where you are or who you are. We can all tune into this channel.

At this exact moment a fly lands stubbornly where my pen sits to continue writing. Something wants me to sit longer with this thought before continuing. I do.

….

During my fly-encouraged writing break, I feel relief… everything is O! K! I just truly learnt I have access to this moment whenever I want or need it. I just have to STOP DOING THINGS and SIT STILL.

After some time, I decide to walk down back into the rigid structures of the city. Multiple paths down the hill are in front of me, tread by previous humans. It dawns on me that I have a choice to follow these paths where the foliage has parted making way for human traffic… or make a new one of my own. I also realise that to create a new path I would need to destroy some of the nature. Suddenly so much makes sense. We all have a choice in this life and in every moment to forge a new path or stick to the safety of those already travelled. As I walk down the hill across the wild paths other random strangers and fellow explorers pass me and greet me with “hola”. I reach the stairs and pathways that descend into the tourist area filled with groups and couples; the “hola’s” turn into judgemental stares of my tattoos and unconventional clothing. The price of sticking to the safe roads hits me like 1000 arrows. I understand the sadness and closed mindedness of people who rarely venture off the safety of roads laid tidily for them to follow. A part of me is grateful I am an explorer, that I choose to create my own path and not rely on the ones expected for me to follow. The other part of me is sad, sad that those who simply want to make life their own, are often judged and looked at with stares of disagreement.

The path untraveled can be scary and unpredictable but it allows for indescribable moments of beauty, you have to be brave enough to travel it alone. The travelled path is full of judgements and expectations. This is a sad truth but we all have a choice which one we take. Follow others or make a new path to inspire others to follow. Make peace that to create something new means destroying something, an old version of yourself, a small piece of nature, of perfection. That’s the inescapable duality of exploration. Like one step forward in life is one step closer to death. You might die, you might get into trouble by those who are envious of people who break away from the known. But the universe will probably clap for you. It will give you moments where you can revel in separateness of our individual experiences and tap into a togetherness that lurks beneath the busy day to day activities we feel compelled to engage with.

I hope this little story is a inspiration for you to make more new paths. Stop defining life by what already exists and push yourself to make something new, even if it is a little path in a big city.