Wolfgang Maehr

Even the longest journey starts with a single step.

That’s what they say. That’s what they say in order to make it easier to start walking. But reality is different. The journey often started many years ago and the end of it is unknown. It’s one journey – one long journey. Of course one sometimes moves in laps and loops, sometimes crosses bridges, walks through forests and other mazes, but at the end one is walking; day by day.

Another fundamental principle of life is that one never knows how the other path would have been. This is big, and it’s something that makes life so much more colourful and interesting. Because at the end you only know what you have tried out. And only at the end you will know if you actually reach where you had planned to reach, or got carried away completely. Of course, along the way one crosses stretches, where the path ahead is rather clearly visible so that one can roughly gauge what to expect. Not that this needs to become true at any given time, but it’s the direction that one seems to move towards. But then of course again, every step one can choose to leave the path and walk somewhere else.

Now, why am I going on about paths and steps and directions here? Because I have finally moved (temporarily) to Singapore after almost two years in India in order to start the next leg in the journey. And the challenge is not only to decide where to go but as well to start walking.

Of course, if applying the logic from above about the alternative to be unknown, this dilemma can be solved rather easily: Take any path and start walking and you will reach somewhere. Simple and true. But my problem is that I do not like walking in circles because I hope my path to lead further, into unknown terrain. And also, one ideally wants to find a path that leads not just further, but has the right amount of difficulty and experiences along the way so that the energy one used to go on that path shall not be wasted excessively.

And for me, this decision is grand. Many people give the advice to just start walking and adjusting my direction over time, when getting further down along the way. I suspect this advice to be for people who simply do their laps walking on the same terrain for years and that are afraid of seeing new terrain. For me it feels different – of course one misses the comforts of familiar terrains sometimes – but the bigger fear is of heading down a way that doesn’t lead into the direction of my aspirations. So yes, it’s still a proof of me being a control freak. Even worse, a control freak with a general idea of where to head, but no precise criteria.

But then, at the end, there seems to be only one sane approach: Take the path that looks most promising, walk on it vigilantly, looking around for other possibilities, trust in this to lead somewhere and enjoy the scenery.