A Walk Across India
I won the Rockefeller Fellowship from Harvard when I graduated in 2009. The rules are: you can’t work, you can’t study, and you can’t come home. Go to one country for a year and immerse yourself in the culture.
On the advice of Rory Stewart (a professor at Harvard at the time), I walked east from the border of India-Pakistan to the border of India-China. The walk took my about 3 months and covered somewhere north of 500 miles. I stayed with holy men, truck drivers, farmers, students, shopkeepers. Every day I set out from someone’s home, walked between 5 and 20 miles, and found myself invited into a new family’s home for the evening.
Among many other lessons, I mostly learned on this walk: (1) strangers are good, can be trusted, and doing so will open you up to a cycle of primal, rewarding reciprocity; (2) I was capable of much more than I thought. The other lessons are exclusively for discussing over a beer.