A walk to remember

It's been a week now since I got back from Montreal and I wanted to write down some of my final thoughts.

The adjustment has been hard, I'm proud of my achievement, but it's been overall tough. The specific goal of walking to Montreal has been on my mind since March or April of this year. I can remember back to high school, daydreaming on Google Maps looking at long walks or bike rides I could take in the US. At one point I wanted to go from coast-to-coast in the US on foot or by bike. That dream of mine has now been achieved.

So what's next? That's been the big question burning away at me. Our wedding is done and the only thing left is the thank you cards. There's no more walk to plan or train for.

I'll make one final Reddit post today. That whole experience has been absolutely wild. I honestly can't get over how positive people have been in their comments, their curiosity and their words of encouragement. It was all a bit too much at times if I'm being honest but I'm really glad I did it. I have my wife to thank for me posting in the first place. She really encouraged me to share my story.

Because of that I've now been interviewed by a Montreal radio show (starts about one minute in) and BlogTO. I learned that there's a bunch of Toronto Facebook groups out there that just scrape content from Reddit and post without your consent. It's a cool little five minutes of fame moment.

So there's that, I'm looking forward to going back to my happy anonymous life. But I'm also looking ahead to what's next.
My therapist, who I've been with for five years now, told me yesterday that 1) he's proud of what I've done and 2) that it's cool to see how things played out in the Reddit comments. He said something else that I've been circling around but couldn't quite get the words right. It was something to the effect of you took a very normal thing but went at it from an approach that others wouldn't have thought of.

I had originally been looking for something of novelty for my next thing. But he hit the nail on the head as the thing that gives me the rush is the novelty of the process. Whenever I told someone what I was doing while mid-walk, the reactions I would get never got old. When I was closer to Toronto, the reaction of walking to Montreal was one of interest but with a heavy amount of scepticism. By the time I was closer to Kingston, the scepticism faded away. The reactions when I was near the Quebec border were the best. Oh you're walking to Montreal? That's quite a walk! Sorry -- you started in TORONTO?!

It's stroking my ego, no doubt, to show others what I can do. At the risk of sounding like a university admissions letter, the real prize came from proving to myself that I can do a hard thing. I'm realising now that the hard thing wasn't just doing this walk but creating this puzzle to solve for myself in the first place.

Last night, post-therapy, I took my dog to the park and we sat there as the sun was setting. She, chewing on a stick; me, chewing on thoughts. What is the next puzzle to solve? What is the next thing that I will look at and think literally no one is making me do this? And what is that next thing that will make me say I can't believe I did that.

Open to ideas, so far I have:
  • Turn an old landline phone into one that will work with WhatsApp while maintaining the same interface (ideally a rotary phone)
  • Bake bread as Carl Sagan would
    • Though I likely can't invent the universe, I might be able to get close. The idea here is none of the ingredients could be bought, they must all be sourced in their rawest forms, ideally without money for the good. Like flying to Saskatchewan, working on a farm for a few days in exchange for some wheat that I would mill into flour.
  • Go back in time skills
    • Basic premise is you go back in time, you say "hey! we have phones in the future" but then you have no way to actually make a phone.
    • In the process of looking up what planted the seed for this idea I found out this may have already been done?
    • I've spent like an hour searching for the meme or comic where I originally tried to find this, but to no avail.
    • Last bullet point here, I stumbled on this interesting essay when trying to find the root comic. It's an ode to capitalism and market forces but it's also one of those fun "take a moment to appreciate an everyday thing" things. Similar to AJ Jacobs' excellent book Thanks a Thousand about thanking every single person involved in making a cup of coffee. He made a TED talk about it too. Oh boy, I'm really abusing bullet points here.

So look forward to my next posts detailing how I'm building a functioning society only using gerbils or whatever idea I land on.