Puriq

Today, while walking the road, I met a puriq — a walker. Another traveler, like me.

He was a young man traveling with his llama toward a celebration in a community farther along the road. He had never been there before. In fact, he seemed to know remarkably little about where he was going. Other travelers had told him there would be a celebration, and apparently that was enough. He gathered what he needed, took up his staff, and began walking.

We shared the road for a while. He talked about the people he might meet and everything he hoped to see. Every bend seemed to hold another possibility for him. He watched a condor circling above the mountains more closely than he watched the trail beneath his feet.

I asked him whether he was worried about arriving somewhere he had never been. He looked at me as though the question had never occurred to him. There was something contagious about his courage. Perhaps it was the particular bravery that belongs to innocence, before experience has taught someone all the reasons they ought to be afraid.

Eventually our paths separated. He continued toward a place he had never seen, following a celebration he had only heard about.

I watched him disappear farther along the road and wondered how many journeys begin exactly this way: someone hears that something is waiting beyond the next mountain, gathers what they can carry, and takes the first step.