Day 34 - Buying New Backpacks, And Why It Is So Hard To Change Our Personalities, The Long Walk South In Taiwan
We now realize that the climate will not change much before we complete our walk and leave Taiwan.
Since we are walking south, the weather is getting hotter, so all there is to do, is to change the way we are experiencing the heat.
Our friend Joseph, who grew up here in Kaohsuing, told us that for him, the heat is totally manageable.
He is correct, because after a few hours of walking together, each one of us is showing different personal levels of how we are experience the heat.
After hours in the heat, I have wet hair and my clothes are very damp.
The clouds make a big difference in providing shade.
Today the effective temperature was 97 degrees (36 degrees Celsius) but the partly cloudy sky, and choosing to walk on the shaded side of the street, gave us a feeling of a pleasant stroll.
We wanted to walk around the city of Kaohsuing, exploring the neighborhoods around the Fengdhan district, located east of the city center.
In the morning, we met with Wendy and Joseph, who came to our hotel bearing goodbye gifts of drinks and snacks for us.
Together we walked to the Meilidaojieyun MRT Station, voted one of the top ten prettiest subway stations in the world.
It has contemporary stained glass ceilings, designed by a Japanese and an Italian artist.
We said heartfelt thanks and farewells to Wendy and Joseph, who will be taking the train today back to Taipei.
Their plan is to spend a day or two at their newly acquired farm, and then head to Japan.
Jules and I were having a lot of doubts about our decisions to walk long hard pilgrimages.
We also had doubts about our life choices and about our inner progress or lack of it.
We went to a nearby Starbucks and had a long conversation, clearing the air between us.
We talked about the motto that says, "Don't quit on a bad day"!
That is frequently said and heard by people hiking on US long-distance trails.
The idea behind it is that you should not make big decisions about your life or future, while you are experiencing a bad day.
A hard day is just that, a hard day, not an indication of what you should and shouldn’t do in your life.
Long distance walking and pilgrimages can be hard, tedious, dull, monotonous and even boring at times.
Walking is so slow and can be difficult at times, and it puts you face to face with your littleness and all your weaknesses.
It is not fun to see yourself in this light every day.
People like to feel good and look good, have fun and not to struggle and still feel weak.
Another point is, we have already walked so many pilgrimages in the past ten years, so must we continue doing it every year?
Does it add something new to our lives that we haven’t learned before?
Or are we just repeating the same old experiences?
Is it this specific pilgrimage that is causing us to doubt ourselves and the experience of walking long distances?
Is it the unbearable heat?
Would we feel differently if we loved the scenery that we are walking through?
Memories of the beautiful landscape we walked through in Switzerland came back to my mind.
Ancient Roman wineries with stone edged fields of grapevines lined the road, and beautiful lakes with stone towns that we passed through, where every house added to the beauty of the countryside….
I felt nothing but gratitude to be walking there.
I felt fortunate to be surrounded by that beauty.
“Don’t quit on a hard day” said the voice in my head.
We walked to an area of the city called Wei Wu Mi Mi Village.
It is a collection of low income concrete apartment buildings, that have been beautifully painted in bright and fanciful colors and designs by artists from all over the world.
We spent time touring and photographing the buildings, admiring the art and wondering why low income housing has so many bars on the windows on the upper floors…
Do they really fear being robbed on the seventh floor?
What there is to steal from a person that can only afford to live in a one bedroom apartment in a low income neighborhood?
After a while, we were thirsty and hungry for lunch.
Many of the vegan restaurants in the area were already closing down their lunch service.
We found a small funky vegan restaurant, owned by a lady who was doing everything in the kitchen by herself.
She had a full restaurant but reluctantly agreed to clear one table for us.
We ate a peanut butter & jelly-vegan bacon burger, which was really good, and salad with sweet potatoes and a flat bread.
We were served last, because we had arrived last, but we didn’t mind waiting, because the place was nicely air-conditioned and we could continue our talk.
We talked about the fact that maybe we needed new backpacks.
The backpacks we have are really lightweight.
They are well made in Japan, and they are very light, but they have no frame, which means that they stick to our already sweaty backs, and weigh heavily on our shoulders.
Our friends Wendy and Joseph are walking with much lighter packs, designed in Switzerland for the outdoors Mammut company, and they do have frames that help distribute the weight to the hips, yet are very lightweight.
We decided that we should try and find a Mammut store, and go try some of their backpacks.
At the huge Dream Mall, we found a .Mammut store.
It took us a long time to find the store inside the massive mall, which was so crowded with people.
We joked about the fact that this is why the streets are always empty of people, because everyone is in the nice air conditioned modern malls, shopping and eating good food in an air conditioned environment.
Finally we got some help and found the Mammut store.
Luckily they had a good selection of backpacks for men and for women.
We asked them to put some weight in the backpacks so we could see how they felt on our backs.
They put some stuff sacks inside the backpacks and we walked around the store and chatted, seeing how they felt.
I selected the same backpack that Wendy and Joseph have, which felt good on my back.
Jules selected a backpack that has a spine adjustment, that moves with your back movements.
We also bought a hiking shirt for Jules.
The prices were much higher than in the USA, but we figured that we would need the backpacks for our walk in Japan, which will occur before we return home to the USA.
For dinner, we wanted to eat in a vegan restaurant in the mall.
They had two choices, one a vegan buffet that looked really good, and the other a good looking vegan restaurant, where you order a la carte.
We chose the a la carte only because we were not hungry enough for a buffet and didn’t want to be tempted to eat too much.
It was the only bad meal we ate on this pilgrimage.
Back in our hotel, we spoke to the front desk about our options of how to ship our old backpacks to our hotel in Taipei.
Satisfied that it shouldn’t be a problem, we did our nightly routine of showers, laundry and collecting our thoughts for the day.
We spoke frequently today about the importance of not having a fixed personality, but being flexible and ever changing.
A personality is a prison of some kind, boxing you in behind bars of your likes and dislikes.
But why do we have personalities and why is it so hard for us to change our personalities?
Our experiences create intense emotions.
We tend to identify with our emotions.
Anger, criticism, bitterness, loneliness, frustration, fears, insecurity, all become part of our identity.
Our brain and our body get addicted to those feelings and thoughts, no matter how negative or unpleasant they are.
We tend to see them as “mine” and believe that they are just a part of who we are.
We do not see them as a choice we make again and again.
Inside your brain, the same pattern of thoughts and feelings, no matter how fearful and negative they are, become familiar circuits which then create even stronger links.
The body responds by producing certain chemicals in response to your intense feelings, that we become addicted to.
Certain hormones and peptides are released into the blood stream and get attached to our cells, creating a sense of familiarity.
This is how we get addicted to overeating for example, by learning to like the sensation of feeling stuffed, because it is familiar to us.
We get addicted to fear, because it puts us on edge and we believe that it is a realistic response to the reality of the dangers of the world.
We become addicted to being ourselves, because it has become a familiar sensation.
In order to change, we need to create new sequences and new patterns, and imagine and envision a new self.
Then we need to convince ourselves that this new flexible self, is already part of our new reality.
With love,
Tali
Today’s Stats:
Steps - 20,147
Daily Distance - 13 km.
Total Distance To Date - 539 km
