Paths Are Made By Walking
By
Nipun Mehta, May 14, 2012
The 2012's Baccalaureate speaker at
the University of Pennsylvania was an unconventional choice for an Ivy League
school. To address their newly-minted graduates, aspiring to dazzling careers,
they picked a man who has never in his adult life, applied for a job. A man who
hasn't worked for pay in nearly a decade, and whose self-stated mission is
simply "to bring smiles to the world and stillness to my heart". This
off-the-radar speaker launched his address with a startling piece of advice.
Following up with four key insights gleaned from a radical 1000 km walking
pilgrimage through the villages of India. As he closed his one-of-a-kind
Graduation Day speech, the sea of cap and gowned students rose to their feet
for a standing ovation. What follows is the full transcript :
*****
Thank you to my distinguished friends, President Amy
Gutmann, Provost Vincent Price and Rev. Charles Howard for inviting me to share
a few reflections on this joyous occasion. It is an honour and privilege to
congratulate you -- UPenn’s class of 2012.
Right now each one of you is sitting on the runway of
life primed for takeoff. You are some of the world's most gifted, elite, and
driven college graduates – and you are undeniably ready to fly. So what I’m
about to say next may sound a bit crazy. I want to urge you, not to fly, but to
– walk. Four years ago, you walked into this marvelous laboratory of higher
learning. Today, heads held high, you walk to receive your diplomas. Tomorrow,
you will walk into a world of infinite possibilities.
But walking, in our high-speed world, has
unfortunately fallen out of favor. The word “pedestrian” itself is used to
describe something ordinary and commonplace. Yet, walking with intention has
deep roots. Australia's aboriginal youth go on walkabouts as a rite of passage;
Native American tribes conduct vision quests in the wilderness; in Europe, for
centuries, people have walked the Camino de Santiago, which spans the breadth
of Spain. Such pilgrims place one foot firmly in front of the other, to fall in
step with the rhythms of the universe and the cadence of their own hearts.
Back in 2005, six months into our marriage, my wife
and I decided to “step it up” ourselves and go on a walking pilgrimage. At the
peak of our efforts with Service Space, we wondered if we had the capacity to
put aside our worldly success and seek higher truths. Have you ever thought of
something and then just known that it had to happen? It was one of those
things. So we sold all our major belongings, and bought a one-way ticket to
India. Our plan was to head to Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram, since he had always
been an inspiration to us, and then walk South. Between the two of us, we
budgeted a dollar a day, mostly for incidentals -- which meant that for our
survival we had to depend utterly on the kindness of strangers. We ate whatever
food was offered and slept wherever place was offered.
Now, I do have to say, such ideas come with a warning:
do not try this at home, because your partner might not exactly welcome this
kind of honeymoon. :-)
For us, this walk was a pilgrimage -- and our goal was
simply to be in a space larger than our egos, and to allow that compassion to
guide us in unscripted acts of service along the way. Stripped entirely of our
comfort zone and accustomed identities, could we still “keep it real”? That was
our challenge.
We ended up walking 1000 kilometres over three months.
In that period, we encountered the very best and the very worst of human nature
-- not just in others, but also within ourselves.
Soon after we ended the pilgrimage, my uncle casually
popped the million dollar question at the dinner table: "So, Nipun, what
did you learn from this walk?" I didn't know where to begin. But quite
spontaneously, an acronym -- W-A-L-K -- came to mind, which encompassed the key
lessons we had learned, and continue to relearn, even to this day. As you start
the next phase of your journey, I want to share those nuggets with the hope
that it might illuminate your path in some small way too.
The W in WALK stands for Witness. When you walk, you quite literally see more. Your field of vision is
nearly 180 degrees, compared to 40 degrees when you’re travelling at 62 miles
per hour. Higher speeds smudge our peripheral vision, whereas walking actually
broadens your canvas and dramatically shifts the objects of your attention. For
instance, on our pilgrimage, we would notice the sunrise everyday, and how, at
sunset, the birds would congregate for a little party of their own. Instead of
adding Facebook friends online, we were actually making friends in person,
often over a cup of hot “chai”. Life around us came alive in a new way.
A walking pace is the speed of community. Where high
speeds facilitate separation, a slower pace gifts us an opportunity to commune.
As we traversed rural India at the speed of a couple
of miles per hour, it became clear how much we could learn simply by bearing
witness to the villagers' way of life. Their entire mental model is different
-- the multiplication of wants is replaced by the basic fulfilment of human needs.
When you are no longer preoccupied with asking for more and more stuff; then
you just take what is given and give what is taken. Life is simple again. A
farmer explained it to us this way: "You cannot make the clouds rain more;
you cannot make the sun shine less. They are just nature's gifts -- take it or
leave it."
When the things around you are seen as gifts, they are
no longer a means to an end; they are the means and the end. And thus, a
cow-herder will tend to his animals with the compassion of a father, a village
woman will wait 3 hours for a delayed bus without a trace of anger, a child
will spend countless hours fascinated by stars in the galaxy, and finding his
place in the vast cosmos.
So with today's modernized tools at your ready
disposal, don’t let yourself zoom obliviously from point A to point B on the
highways of life; try walking the back roads of the world, where you will
witness a profoundly inextricable connection with all living things.
The A in WALK stands for Accept. When walking in this way, you place yourself in the palm of the
universe, and face its realities head on. We walked at the peak of summer, in
merciless temperatures hovering above 120 degrees. Sometimes we were hungry,
exhausted and even frustrated. Our bodies ached for just that extra drink of
water, a few more moments in the shade, or just that little spark of human
kindness. Many times we received that extra bit, and our hearts would overflow
with gratitude. But sometimes we were abruptly refused, and we had to cultivate
the capacity to accept the gifts hidden in even the most challenging of
moments.
I remember one such day, when we approached a rest
house along a barren highway. As heavy trucks whizzed past, we saw a sign,
announcing that guests were hosted at no charge. “Ah, our lucky day,” we
thought in delight. I stepped inside eagerly. The man behind the desk looked up
and asked sharply, “Are you here to see the temple?” A simple yes from my lips
would have instantly granted us a full meal and a room for the night. But it
wouldn’t have been the truth. So instead, I said, “Well, technically, no sir.
We’re on a walking pilgrimage to become better people. But we would be glad to
visit the temple.” Rather abruptly, he retorted: “Um, sorry, we can’t host
you.” Something about his curt arrogance triggered a slew of negative emotions.
I wanted to make a snide remark in return and slam the door on my way out.
Instead, I held my raging ego in check. In that state of physical and mental
exhaustion, it felt like a Herculean task-- but through the inner turmoil a
voice surfaced within, telling me to accept the reality of this moment.
There was a quiet metamorphosis in me. I humbly let go
of my defences, accepted my fate that day, and turned to leave without a
murmur. Perhaps the man behind the counter sensed this shift in me, because he
yelled out just then, “So what exactly are you doing again?” After my brief
explanation he said, “Look, I can’t feed you or host you, because rules are
rules. But there are restrooms out in the back. You could sleep outside the
male restroom and your wife can sleep outside the female restroom.” Though he
was being kind, his offer felt like salt in my wounds. We had no choice but to
accept.
That day we fasted and that night, we slept by the
bathrooms. A small lie could’ve bought us an upgrade, but that would’ve been no
pilgrimage. As I went to sleep with a wall separating me from my wife, I had
this beautiful, unbidden vision of a couple climbing to the top of a mountain
from two different sides. Midway through this difficult ascent, as the man
contemplated giving up, a small sparrow flew by with this counsel, “Don’t quit
now, friend. Your wife is eager to see you at the top.” He kept climbing. A few
days later, when the wife found herself on the brink of quitting, the little
sparrow showed up with the same message. Step by step, their love sustained
their journey all the way to the mountaintop. Visited by the timely grace of
this vision, I shed a few grateful tears -- and this story became a touchstone
not only in our relationship, but many other noble friendships as well.
So I encourage you to cultivate equanimity and accept
whatever life tosses into your laps -- when you do that, you will be blessed
with the insight of an inner transformation that is yours to keep for all of
time.
The L in WALK stands for Love. The more we learned from nature, and built a kind of inner resilience to
external circumstances, the more we fell into our natural state -- which was to
be loving. In our dominant paradigm, Hollywood has insidiously co-opted the
word, but the love I’m talking about here is the kind of love that only knows
one thing -- to give with no strings attached. Purely. Selflessly.
Most of us believe that to give, we first need to have
something to give. The trouble with that is, that when we are taking stock of
what we have, we almost always make accounting errors. Oscar Wilde once
quipped, “Now-a-days, people know the price of everything, but the value of
nothing.” We have forgotten how to value things without a price tag. Hence,
when we get to our most abundant gifts -- like attention, insight, compassion
-- we confuse their worth because they’re, well, priceless.
On our walking pilgrimage, we noticed that those who
had the least were most readily equipped to honour the priceless. In urban
cities, the people we encountered began with an unspoken wariness: “Why are you
doing this? What do you want from me?” In the countryside, on the other hand,
villagers almost always met us with an open-hearted curiosity launching
straight in with: “Hey buddy, you don’t look local. What’s your story?”
In the villages, your worth wasn’t assessed by your
business card, professional network or your salary. That innate simplicity
allowed them to love life and cherish all its connections.
Extremely poor villagers, who couldn’t even afford
their own meals, would often borrow food from their neighbours to feed us. When
we tried to refuse, they would simply explain: “To us, the guest is God. This
is our offering to the divine in you that connects us to each other.” Now, how
could one refuse that? Street vendors often gifted us vegetables; in a very touching
moment, an armless fruit-seller once insisted on giving us a slice of
watermelon. Everyone, no matter how old, would be overjoyed to give us
directions, even when they weren’t fully sure of them. :) And I still remember
the woman who generously gave us water when we were extremely thirsty -- only
to later discover that she had to walk 10 kilometres at 4AM to get that one
bucket of water. These people knew how to give, not because they had a lot, but
because they knew how to love life. They didn’t need any credit or assurance
that you would ever return to pay them back. Rather, they just trusted in the
pay-it-forward circle of giving.
When you come alive in this way, you'll realize that
true generosity doesn’t start when you have some thing to give, but rather when
there’s nothing in you that’s trying to take. So I hope that you will make all
your precious moments an expression of loving life.
And lastly, the K in WALK stands for
Know Thyself. Sages have long informed us that when we serve others
unconditionally, we shift from the me-to-the-we and connect more deeply with
the other. That matrix of inter-connections allows for a profound quality of
mental quietude. Like a still lake undisturbed by waves or ripples, we are then
able to see clearly into who we are and how we can live in deep harmony with
the environment around us.
When one foot walks, the other rests. Doing and being,
have to be in balance.
Our rational mind wants to rightfully ensure progress,
but our intuitive mind also needs space for the emergent, unknown and unplanned
to arise. Doing is certainly important, but when we aren't aware of our
internal ecosystem, we get so vested in our plans and actions, that we don't
notice the build-up of mental residue. Over time, that unconscious internal
noise starts polluting our motivations, our ethics and our spirit. And so, it
is critical to still the mind. A melody, after all, can only be created with
the silence in between the notes.
As we walked -- witnessed, accepted, loved -- our
vision of the world indeed grew clearer. That clarity, paradoxically enough,
blurred our previous distinctions between me versus we, inner transformation
versus external impact, and selfishness versus selflessness. They were
inextricably connected. When a poor farmer gave me a tomato as a parting gift,
with tears rolling down his eyes, was I receiving or giving? When sat for hours
in silent meditation, was the benefit solely mine or would it ripple out into
the world? When I lifted the haystack off an old man's head and carried it for
a kilometre, was I serving him or serving myself?
Which is to say, don't just go through life -- grow
through life. It will be easy and tempting for you to arrive at reflexive
answers -- but make it a point, instead, to acknowledge mystery and welcome
rich questions... questions that nudge you towards a greater understanding of
this world and your place in it.
That’s W-A-L-K. And today, at this momentous milestone
of your life, you came in walking and you will go out walking. As you walk on
into a world that is increasingly aiming to move beyond the speed of thought, I
hope you will each remember the importance of travelling at the speed of
thoughtfulness. I hope that you will take time to witness our magnificent
interconnections. That you will accept the beautiful gifts of life even when
they aren’t pretty, that you will practice loving selflessly and strive to know
your deepest nature.
I want to close with a story about my great grandfather.
He was a man of little wealth who still managed to give every single day of his
life. Each morning, he had a ritual of going on a walk -- and as he walked, he
diligently fed the ant hills along his path with small pinches of wheat flour.
Now that is an act of micro generosity so small that it might seem utterly
negligible, in the grand scheme of the universe. How does it matter? It matters
in that it changed him inside. And my great grandfather's goodness shaped the
worldview of my grandparents who in turn influenced that of their children --
my parents. Today those ants and the ant hills are gone, but my great grandpa’s
spirit is very much embedded in all my actions and their future ripples. It is
precisely these small, often invisible, acts of inner transformation that mould
the stuff of our being, and bend the arc of our shared destiny.
On your walk, today and always, I wish you the eyes to
see the anthills and the heart to feed them with joy.
May you be blessed. Change yourself -- change the
world.
*****
The above transcript of the
Baccalaureate address to University of Pennsylvania's graduating class of 2012,
delivered by Nipun Mehta, the founder of ServiceSpace.org,
a non-profit organization that works at the intersection of gift-economy,
technology and volunteerism. His popular TED talk Designing
for Generosity provides an overview of their work
and guiding principles.
*****
