Sunday, 23 September
The next day I walked into the town of Dinar feeling lonely, uncomfortable, and out of place. I knew I needed some alone time to process something but I wasn’t sure what, so instead of looking for a public place to stay, I checked into a hotel and went straight up to my room.
I felt a familiar pull. Go back to Çardak. Just spend time there and give up the walk. Part of me recognized how ridiculous that sentiment was. After all, Çardak was a small village of 3,000 people. I didn’t even speak the language. I would be bored with the place in less than a week. But the siren call of Çardak was almost as strong as the siren call of Denizli had been a week or two ago. I longed for the comfort of Çardak. I wanted to bathe in its familiarity for the rest of eternity.
Amidst the noise, the cold, rational voice whispered faintly to me, Listen to me now, let me drive. So I pulled out a pen and wrote a blog post:
The Resistance
There’s a book I love, absolutely love. I highly recommend it to just about anyone who will listen. It’s called “The War of Art,” by Steven Pressfield. The book is a very quick, simple read. You never have to read it again, because the idea is so simple:
Whenever you try to do something worthwhile, the Resistance will do everything in its power to knock you off track. It will reason with you like a brilliant lawyer, or it will jam a gun in your face like a stick-up man, whatever it takes to throw you off track and put you back where you used to be.
The Resistance comes from inside you. It will never die. It will never go away. It is stronger than you are. Do not try to fight it. You will lose, and you will waste valuable time and energy that would have been better used getting your work done. So, learn how to welcome the Resistance into the room, and continue working while it sits across the table from you, staring at you.
On this walk, the Resistance is with me at all times. Most of the time it appears in smaller ways, like yesterday morning in Gökçek, when I woke up and the air was so fresh and the grass was so soft I wondered if I could avoid walking for the day.
A couple of times, however, the Resistance hit me so hard I thought the walk would be over.
One of those times was when I hurt my foot a couple of weeks ago. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the panic and black despair that washed over me on that day. But they were just the Resistance, come to distract me from the clear thinking I’d need to get myself back on track.
I stepped aside from them and spent the next few days nursing my foot back to health and chanting to myself, “calm down, just work the program.”
This morning the Resistance came in one of its more common forms, that in which I wake up worrying that A. I’m not walking far enough, and B. I’m spending too much money.
So I checked yet again, and for the 3-1/2 weeks I’ve been on the road, I’ve been covering 55 miles per week (my goal is 55-60 miles per week), and I’ve been spending $13 per day (which is what I’ve budgeted).
Even with the downtime to nurse my foot, and some unexpected hotel stays, I am hitting both of my targets: walk 55-60 miles per week and spend $13 per day.
So at least until the Resistance hits me again, probably sometime later today, I am feeling good. Out here on the road, anything can happen, and it usually does, but as long as I hit those two targets, that anything is fine.
As I drifted off to sleep, I reminded myself of a key lesson I was learning:
Your emotions are going to fluctuate wildly on this trip, and they will be horribly inaccurate gauges of reality. So what you feel doesn’t matter nearly as much as keeping those two key indicators on track.
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In 2012, Matt sold off or gave away almost everything he owned. He strapped whatever was left to his back, flew to Turkey, and walked across it. Every foot, from one end of the country to the other. Along the way, he slept in mosque gardens, dined with strangers, and stumbled into refugee camps.
This is the story of that journey. We’ll be publishing one chapter each week from his book. If you would like to read the whole thing at once, you can purchase his book titled Heathen Pilgrim: Walk Across Turkey on Amazon.
