Swallowed by the City
How Escape Does Not Promise Clarity
“What the hell am I doing here?” I found myself asking, standing under an umbrella by the side of the road, desperately waiting for the next angkot to slide into my periphery. The sudden violent rain had attacked without mercy —gifting my socks with an unpleasant wet cold, contrasting with the sticky heat of my shirt from the previous hours-long walk.
A month-and-a-half ago, I had been thrown into that chasm we call holiday season, tumbling through the days with high hopes but no clear blueprint. Idealistic visions of a million things to do with my free time soon transformed into a messy confusion of impulsive ventures and terrible sleep schedules.
Seeking meaningful sensations, as per my nature, I ended up getting carried away with committing to each new thing that popped itself into my vision. But once they each lost their rose tint and initial novelty, they each became a new distraction, a new clutter, a new chain. So, I don’t think it’s a paradox to say that my end-of-semester break was so neverending, yet at the same time so apt at rendering the sensation of failing to get anything done.
The blurred days had just made me numb.
A dumb numb.
A glum numb.
A numb numb.
Come to think of it, maybe I was just bored. Or stuck in a rut. Or lonely. I don’t know. Perhaps I just needed something profound, something new. A wake-up call. A violent shake.
You know how people take a walk to get some fresh air and to clear their minds? A walk does tend to declutter one’s head space. But I had tempest of a mess up there. So instead, I solotripped.
For the most part, solotripping is as logistically cheap as you are willing to make it. So long as you’re comfortable with the discomfort. And I was searching for that discomfort. It forces you to use the eyes of your everyday pedestrian and eases you into a zone of growth.
And that was why that night I was waiting, back pained and feet sore, for an angkot in Jakarta’s merciless downpour.
Throughout this trip, I had committed to a few baseline rules, one of them being “no on-demand online transport”, forcing me to exclusively walk or use public transport. I had even come up with a challenge to only consult GMaps every 10 minutes (for only 5 seconds each at that) in order to systematically get lost along the way to each destination of my itinerary.
After all, I wanted to be swallowed by the city. To force myself to notice the sights and the sounds and the smells — and with that, better understand the aches and sensations of my own experience.
So swallowed by the city, I was. In the span of 24 hours, I had already been caught in the salaryman rush hour, joined in the crowds fighting for free Jumatan food at Istiqlal (which was sour), headed all the way to a museum only to find it was closed, opened my book and my laptop in the city’s various nooks, took the MRT end-to-end, went from minimarket to minimarket in search for an e-money card when I found mine was missing, and walked around Monas to Bundaran HI to who knows where until my calves cramped.
But that was that. I tried to be as mindful and as ihsan as I could, I saw and heard and felt plenty, and I was stupidly tired. And so what?
I wish I could string together a profoundly inspiring piece of how my experiences summoned new insights to move forwards with, as I usually do. And yes, it would be a lie if I said I got a net sum of nothing out of the past few days, and I would not discourage any of you from doing anything similar, but this trip was definitely not the vehicle of clarity I was hoping for.
This time, I was a child coming out of an arcade more or less empty-handed.
But maybe that’s how it is sometimes. And that in itself might just be a lesson worth the entire trip.
