Rishikesh to Varanasi

From a young age, this question has walked with me and with my own development: "What would you be without it?" Fairly early on, I understood that we build an identity for ourselves around the events and happenings of our lives. "I am a professional." "I am a family man." "I am a product of my homeland." "I am a victim of circumstance." And so on. Inside a relative identity like this, me against the circumstances, a dependency hides, and the question of what I would be without that identity always intrigued me.

A self-identity built on my relational connection to experience is bound, in the end, to be shaken. We know this, yet we try to ignore it or forget it, and we channel our energy into fortifying the support around which our identity is built, the one that gives us an illusion of stability and safety. But inevitably, that support will be shaken, will crack, will fall apart. Life, after all, is stronger than everything, and always changing, and the point in time at which the structure we built collapses is always just beyond the near horizon.

I have experienced this personally several times along my way. I had to reinvent myself when I left Israel to live in the Canadian Midwest. I had to reinvent myself when I realized that the path that had been paved for me, as an air force officer and as an engineer, did not fit my innermost truth. I had to reinvent myself when my children left home as teenagers, one to study in western Canada and the other to play soccer in Spain, which left me with the question: what does parenting mean now...?

Events like these can feel threatening, but they can also be an astonishing opportunity for inner change. The journey I am setting out on, I dedicate to people standing at such a crossroads, where something collapses and something new, something different, is born.

When I was thirty, I learned about a tradition that was practiced in India. According to that tradition, a person who reaches the age of sixty and hears the call can choose to set out on a spiritual search. The society around him gives him legitimacy to do so, and releases him from his obligations as a family man and a provider. They even have a name for it: Sadhu (साधु), a person who has chosen to withdraw, to a large degree, from ordinary material and social life, and to devote his life to a spiritual path. That possibility always fascinated me. Now I am sixty, standing at this crossroads in my life, and I choose to answer the call.

The plan is deliberately and intentionally vague. I know where it begins and where it is meant to end, but I do not know what will happen between those two points. The starting point will be at the foot of the Himalayas, in northern India, in a holy city called Rishikesh. From there I will set out on foot, alone, close to a thousand kilometers along the Ganga to the city of Varanasi. With no planned route, no end date, and without knowing how many weeks it will take. For someone who was an officer and also a CEO, people whose whole lives are built on planning and control, this walk is itself the practice: learning to let go of the wheel.

When people ask me why there, of all places, I have no good answer. I am not following in anyone's footsteps, and I do not even know whether there is a paved way to walk between those two points. And I intentionally do not try to look into it. Part of the experience I am giving myself is the surrender to the unknown, to the mystery, which will reveal itself on its own over the days and weeks in which I walk the road.

A pilgrimage is, in many traditions, a journey of purification. As a secular person, the idea of surrendering to the walking, to the changing landscape, to the hardships and the experiences along the way, always appealed to me. I do not know what awaits me. Maybe aching knees and a sense of futility. Maybe a silence I have never known. I am setting out precisely because I do not know. If there is an age at which one is finally allowed to walk without knowing exactly where to, maybe this is that age.

Twenty-year-olds go to India to discover who they are about to become. I am going to discover what can be set down. It is the same great trip, in the opposite direction.

This journey I am not making for myself alone. I dedicate it to everyone standing at those same points of passage: retirement, loss, an emptied home, an aging parent, all those endings and beginnings that have no ceremony and that we hardly ever speak about. Weddings and births we celebrate, but a person can lose, all at once, the roles that defined him, and stand before the eternal question: who am I without it?

I want to open this experience to anyone who would like to use it as a source of inspiration for surrendering to the mystery that reveals itself at the point in time when everything falls apart. You will be able to take part actively, simply by leaving your question on my site, URTHAT.org. I promise to reflect on these questions during the journey, and to share the experience with you.

And may we have a good journey...