A Summit Walk Into the Void

[June 21, 2025; 12:20AM; “Moon” by Kid Francescoli on repeat] 

Sometimes I’m sad but nothing is objectively wrong. Sometimes I’m sad from wearing the world’s sadness for a while, and I try to figure out what to do with it. On days like these, these somewhat acutely painful days,  I eat my favorite snacks until I’m just a tad too full and walk down the road over and over again, looping a particular song, and think and think of nothing in particular and of everything in my mind.  

Lately, I’ve been carrying an unresolved love, a kind of homesickness I can’t name, a foreign discomfort in my own body and an unease of where my place is in this wide world. The walks help to muffle the noise from these unknowns because they open the space for me to exist as I am, breathing as I do, and make me feel like that’s enough. I completely and utterly disregard the life problems that have been haunting me in the background - replying to texts, the reputation at work, the pressures to maintain the me that others know me as. The problems feel diluted and watery and the thoughts on these walks turn slippery, gliding in and out of my head than the concrete blocks that weigh on my mind usually day to day. I walk until I feel lighter, and more peaceful, aligned with the rhythm of the night more. 

If I’m lucky, sometimes in my walk I’ll stumble into the smallest reminder that there’s a point to all of this. Tonight,  it was a soft apartment lamp, tucked away in the bushes near the road. Its glare, a yellow beam that magnified and magnified as I walked closer and closer, shone brighter and brighter and took up all of my field of vision - and disappeared when I walked past it. For a second, just for a moment, I was in its spotlight; I felt a slight warmth; I was given some light. 

Naomi Shihab Nye has a poem called “Famous”, where the river is famous to the fish. The loud voice is famous to silence. it’s a perspective where meaning isn’t inherent, but  born in relationship to others. On days where I’ve withdrawn from the world and no one can touch me - where my friends are far away, my past loves are far away, my family is far away - maybe all I need to ground me is a true moment of brief intimacy, and a feeling that I matter. A moment that only existed because I was there to meet it. 

People will read this and cringe at the cheese and the cliche, but these emotional intensities - there’s no words that can even grab at its surface,  these tumultuous feelings that accompany this existential vertigo. But there are things in your life that carry a weight and a richness. You have to lean into those things to feel like you can get through a day. For me, it’s these words, with their density and texture. On days where I feel empty as a person, I assert that there is some kind of meaning in the words I’m writing down. And if these words only manage to tumble out on walks, where I participate in a moment that makes me witness to my own living, I’ll walk every day to feel this tethering. 

TLDR: do what it takes to get yourself through a particularly hard day. Know yourself and the things that have weight for you, and do them on the days where you don’t have energy for much else. It’s been the Summit walks for me, with the space to exist alone, intimate moments with the rest of the world and some words.