1 – Ride

 At the end of 2021, I decided to take up horse-riding again. At the time I was a beginner, with only a handful of lessons under my belt, sprinkled here and there between long trips to the US for work or study. I wanted to learn riding with an experienced instructor: varying gaits, form, etiquette, and attire.

When I told my mom I was taking up dressage again, she asked me if I would be riding in a ring. I told her yes, I will.

“Round and round?”

“Yes.”

“But what’s the point?” she asked me. “Where do you go?”

“Where do you go when?”

“Once you’ve learned how to ride, where do you go?”

Ever the utilitarian South Asian mama, I could see the wheels in her mind turning.

“What do you mean, where do you go? You learn how to ride in a ring. Everything happens within the ring; I could learn riding for years and years I still won’t know enough. Eventually I can ride cross-country but that’s different, though learning one style makes the other easier.”

“So, you don’t go anywhere or deliver anything?” she asked.

“What do you want me to do, transport cargo on horseback to Sharjah?” I asked, half-exasperated, half-amused.

I could see her silently considering it as a viable possibility.

2- Crunch

A few years prior to my decision to get back on the horse again, I injured my back when I lost my rhythm mid-trot. I crashed backwards into the horse rather than flying off. As the impressive weight of the horse met the base of my not-so-impressive spine I heard a dull, soft crunch. I immediately knew I was in trouble.

The years that followed the injury were challenging, as you could imagine. I could never quite sit into my body anymore. My bones and muscles and skin and fat seemed completely disconnected from one another, trying, and failing to find some harmony. I was always in at least a little bit of pain. COVID overlapped with this period so of course I got increasingly sedentary, switching out a fairly active lifestyle for endless movie marathons (PTA supplemented by endless snacks, if you’re wondering) and an unfathomable amount of time spent snuggled with my laptop. I knew this lifestyle couldn’t last forever, so I eventually decided to figure out the best way to get active again – personal trainers, hours at the gym, yoga, acupuncture, I tried everything, really. I even took up Padel tennis (a Pickleball-like sport popular in South America and the Middle East), grimacing under the jarring fluorescent lights and counting down the minutes until I could be blissfully supine again, with a serving of hot, cheesy fries to comfort me in the way that nothing else could. Everything seemed to make my pain worse.

One day at work, I was unable to tolerate my pain, so I cracked my neck during an international conference call. Oceans away, a colleague mimicked me, moving her head side to side, eyes squeezed shut, delighted at her little performance. I couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.

I knew I had to do something – so I quit everything. And I started walking.

3 – Think

It’s hard to picture a twelve-year-old who goes out on long leisurely walks, but as a child living in Sharjah, I did. Our building faced an enormous green park and a lagoon which turned into sea, so the walk was nothing short of a video game fantasy. City to green to water to city again. I’m not exactly sure why my parents allowed a twelve-year-old to venture out alone – cross the streets alone, stop and buy myself a snack, etc. etc. but I’m sure glad they did. That part of me that walked – vague and indescribable – is one of the only parts of me that has remained energetically untouched in the decades that followed. Some part of me – regardless of where I am presently situated – is always wandering through trees and city streets.

I’ve heard many people describe their thoughts like suitcases moving on conveyor belts. The network of dynamic belts can be complex or simple depending on where they are in their life. Some describe their thoughts like needles stacked on top of each other in a web of metal.

The basic code of my thoughts, however, was formed in Sharjah — somewhere between path and pavement, thoughts directed and splitting into directions as illuminated by helium streetlights.

The structure of my mind feels not so much like conveyor belts or a stack of needles, but much more like infinite, lamp-lit streets – narrow and winding. Dark tracks followed by bits and bobs of warm, pleasant illumination.

4 – Walk

Could I out-walk my pain? If I kept walking, I’m sure I will stumble upon goodness, I told myself. What choice do I have? I could stand still, but standing still feels so much like moving backwards that it becomes moving backwards and you suddenly find yourself in a whiny little moonwalk while the world moves past you.

During my daily walks I realized that most of us default to a gentle, even slightly careless joy. If only we allowed ourselves to it. Walk long enough and you start to catch glimpses of that joy again, peeking back at you through a fine mesh of your accrued disappointment, a weight you didn’t even realize you were carrying, one that takes up residence precisely between your neck and shoulders.

How much we carry in that tiny crook, snugly placed between a pair of shoulder blades. An entire world of worry.

In a futile game of compassion communism, we want everyone we love to have everything and be happy all the time. Perfectly reasonable. There are so many difficult things about getting older, but the consistent one is making peace with knowing that not all your loved ones are at 100% all the time. Finding a way to sleep with that awareness. That allowing joy to flow through your cracks will not deficit theirs as though all our joy is depleting the same finite supply.

My pain persisted. My circulation felt nonexistent: blood felt less like blood and more like tiny stacks of Lego bricks, not flowing through me at all, but piled and stuffed in a sausage casing masquerading as a blood vessel.

Late night walkers follow the same religion. It’s a quiet one. Engagement is limited to polite nods of acknowledgment. We walk around the same mecca, towards the same goal. Round and round, not unlike those dressage horses, learning the forms and contours and etiquette of our bodies and minds, through the simplest act imaginable. An act that biologists once used to characterize us as a species. In history – walking upright – was one of the qualifiers of being human.

You can run through a thousand emotions during a walk – and sometimes they run with you, but if you’re lucky they run past you, and somehow you always end the walk with the right one. The one that is deserving of your time and attention. This is especially beneficial to someone like me, who processes things slowly, over years. Our emotional backlog may enormous, but each walk moved me closer to discovery, and the discoveries lay in patience and repetition.

And then there’s the blissful anti-discovery: while listening to podcasts, I learned so much on my walks that I forgot almost immediately. Facts flowed through my mind like weightless leaves in a directionless wind. I let them pass without the worry of holding on to them. Without the intention of possessing them at all, much less passing them on.

Hundreds of hours of walking brought me precisely where I had started: at the quiet corner of my street, but with thoughts that were more harmonious. There were many voices in my head, but walking quieted the ones that needed silencing and magnified the ones that were dying out. I played no role in this: with each hour logged, each walk tracked – it simply happened on its own.

As a modest fire was ignited under my feet; I kept walking. The nights were freezing, by Dubai standards anyhow. My ears were tinged with a cold that was just barely familiar.

5 – Breathe

One morning I woke up feeling the warmth of my blood circulating through me. I gently bathed in the sun peeking through my white curtains. I can’t remember being pain-free in years.

Vulnerability and caution are as closely linked as being naked and being clothed: you’re just seconds away from complete exposure. Writing with an open heart but a dedication to privacy becomes like a ballet clumsily danced on eggshells, layers, and layers of sheer fabric outfitting a final product of strategic reveals and conceals. As a writer, I am often dancing a similar, blundering ballet in my desire for relevance paired with a rather relatable fear of obsolescence.

But I will share this with you: when I started walking, the streets were not lamp-lit at all. But I kept walking, and I followed one flickering light, and then another, and another – until the city was finally, just barely — aglow.

I wish I could tell you that things were much easier compared to when I started writing this essay. But it’s not true, not really. Some things are easier, but others aren’t quite as aligned as I’d like them to be. After all this work, all those steps… uncertainty, thick as fog, surrounds me.

But that’s alright.

I’ll take a breath and step into the cool mist of the night.