Day 0: Riding the Naruto bus

I’m sitting at my inn (Guest House Naruto O-Henro, where the host Ken-san kindly checked me in at 8pm) and journaling for the first time in 8 days. Today was a travel day—early start at NAIA Terminal 1, where I said goodbye to my parents. The flight to KIX. The two-hour airport wait that went by quickly, and then the bus to Tokushima station, where I napped in between reading online articles and listening to podcasts. Then finally a train to Bando. Oh no, my data, I thought. But, after all, today was the sitting day. From tomorrow, maybe I’d use the internet less? I’m not sure, really, what I’ll end up doing while walking. If I’ll listen to a podcast or an audiobook or music or nothing. Or switch it up depending on how I’m feeling. There are many things I’m not sure about at this juncture. Will I stop for lunch or just eat a big breakfast? How do I make sure the nokyocho don’t get wet? What’s the intention? What am I really trying to do here? I keep thinking back to that moment at a party when I told a friend I was doing this and a friend said, huh! But why do you want to do that? And I realized I had no clear, crisp answer. I just want to. I have the time and resources and energy and I want to. I think I’ll learn something, just like I did farming for a week in rural Kyoto in 2018. I learned I was a bad farmer. But it also anchored me in so many wonderful ways, and was one of the best weeks in a year that I’d found objectively pretty great. Getting off the train at Bando the conductor took my ticket because there were no ticket machines. I took off my headphones. The wind was crisp. The streets were dark and mostly empty until I got to the busier one with the cars; but for a time there I did feel the quiet, and it was interesting. It was only 8pm and the world fell asleep. My suitcase rattling on the street seemed to be the lone noise. And I thought ah, I’m doing it. I’m here. There are things I’m trying to figure out, worries and fears of varying sizes I’ve been working through during the break, a slowly budding desire to work but not before this walk is done, a multitude of questions that sometimes make my head spin. But I’m also trying to go very, very lightly, to actually just really be present. And that includes not trying to be particularly filtered or witty in these entries—I want to keep it like a diary, let you see and feel the moments I’ve had that day, as well as the inside of my brain while I’m doing this. Tomorrow’s the real thing. Guess we’ll see what happens. (Pictured: the Naruto bus I took from KIX to Tokushima. I was not even aware that I’d end up in a city called Naruto.)