Taking a walk

About a year and a half ago, I moved to New Zealand. The company I work for had been looking to expand into the country, and I asked if there’s an opportunity for me to move and build up the business here. They said yes.

I had no idea what I was getting into. Turns out, they didn’t either.

Because even though I arrived as a marketing person, we needed more than a marketer. We needed someone who people can go to for… anything. It started a “here’s your local point of contact” that soon ballooned into a constant barrage of emails and calls from partners and customers and prospects asking questions, escalating issues, validating ideas, pitching events, and so much more. Plus, I was actively building my network—attending events, talking to people, trying to build partnerships, understanding how businesses operate… it’s fair to say I had a lot going on.

More than once, I’d be typing away in my home office at 3:45pm and remember I’d run out of food or toothpaste or shampoo or toilet paper. Or I’d walk into my living room and realise I hadn’t vacuumed or taken the recycling out for weeks. I’d laugh about it with colleagues after, while secretly wondering why I was so active, energetic, focussed on work but so careless and lazy about my home.

I enjoy 70 percent of my work. It involves meeting lots of new people, learning about their life and work, and trying to identify how we might work together.

The other 30 percent is gruelling. That involves working closely with my colleagues overseas. So lots of late nights, trying to get my brain to think straight even after it’d been running on work mode for 12 hours straight. Then I’d go to bed with my mind racing and refusing to shut down for another two hours. I never really stopped to think how crazy it was that that was week after week and month after month, rather than just a one-time thing.

Plenty of times I told myself it was just for this one project or one event, and things would become a lot less hectic after that. But after a year of it, I had to admit it wasn’t going to slow down. Don’t get me wrong, I had lots of “slow” days that I cherished. But those slow days were about 8-9 hours of work without any late meetings, events, or otherwise large stressors. In reality, that’s not a “slow” day, that’s the definition of a normal day.

I have a fairly high tolerance for stress. However, I’m also aware of what chronic stress can do to the body, inside and out, even if it doesn’t show straightaway. Sidenote—if you haven’t yet, I highly recommend reading Why Zebras Don’t get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky.

So even though I knew I could keep pushing, I also knew that I shouldn’t. When you do weight training, they say you should do as many reps as you can until the point of failure. That’s how I’ve always thought about work stress as well—keep pushing until you can’t. One of my good friends once said that she’ll quit her job when she has her first heart attack. Not if but when. She’d been in that job for about 18 years, and she knew the stress would probably cause her to break. Work isn’t weight training. Yes, I want to get better and stronger and more accomplished in my work, but I don’t want to do that at the cost of getting sick.

So I decided to take a walk to clear my head.

I’d been wanting to walk Te Araroa for years now. It’s a tramping trail that runs the entire length of New Zealand. It’s always been one of those, “Oh, I’ll do it someday” kind of things. So in December last year, I sat down to think through what it’d really take to do this walk. There’s a lot—food, accomodation, trail logistics, gear, safety, hygiene, loneliness, weather, and so many things that we take for granted on a daily basis.

So I started planning. I watched a lot of videos on YouTube, followed all the Facebook groups, looked through the trail inch by inch (got tired mid-way through the North Island), started collecting hundreds of links of potential gear, and created high-density, high calorie food recipes.

It was a glorious three weeks of intense work. Then the Christmas/New Year break ended and we went back to work. The full force of my daily routine returned, and this time it hit harder. We’d built momentum the previous year so now it was about accelerating—about doing more things, bigger things, and doing them faster. I love this stuff, remember. So I dove headfirst. I said yes to all the things, forgetting—every time—that I was also saying yes to more late night meetings. As much fun as it was, it was also utterly exhausting. Every chance I got, I went back to my Te Araroa Trello board and looked through my research, adding a few more links. As March and May rolled around, I was in the thick of work with no brain power left even to write my daily haiku. For the first time in over five years, I stopped writing haiku every day. I had no energy left to give to my creativity. But I knew I still wanted to walk TA this year.

So in June this year, I rolled up my metaphorical sleeves and started narrowing down my gear options. By July I had most of my gear, and a lot of uncertainty about how many layers I’d need. I also spoke to my boss about taking time off. He took a couple of days to think it over and told me he couldn’t let me take time off. It was too much disruption for the business to lose the only marketing person in the country.

So I spent the next three weeks trying to convince myself to do the walk next year, instead. To keep pushing for another year because I know it’ll be fine.

But I couldn’t do it. The idea of doing it all for another year without a break scared me. Even if others don’t see it that way, I saw it as a health and safety issue. I didn’t want to end up in hospital for me to wake up and give myself a break.

I went back to boss and explained that I’m totally spent, and I need this time off. He understood, of course. He always did. But when you work for a big company, things like this need to be run up the food chain to be formally approved.

Now we wait.

I also just ordered a couple of water bladders and a backcountry bidet for the trip.

The land owns us

I’m walking Te Araroa (TA) later this year. There, I’ve said it. For the first time since I fell in love with the idea seven years ago and seriously started planning for it last December.

Loosely transliterated to “The Long Pathway,” Te Araroa is a 3000 kilometre (1800 miles, if you’re that way inclined) tramping/running trail that goes through the entire length of New Zealand. From the top of the North Island, Cape Reinga, to the bottom of the South Island, Bluff, the trail snakes through iconic forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, and volcanic craters. It’s one hell of a way to travel through the country.

What I love most about the trail is not its length or its majesty. It’s the fact that this trail only exists because of the kindness and generosity of humans that owe nothing to the people who walk the trail every year.

1800 kilometres of the 3000-km trail is on public land monitored, managed, and cared for by the Department of Conservation—colloquially known as DOC, a little nod to the inimitable healing power the Department and its humans seem to have on the land.

The remaining 1200 kilometres are on private land. The Te Araroa Trust and DOC work closely with these private landowners to make sure the trail continues to live on for people who come from thousands of miles away to experience it. It’s a lot of work, negotiating with and reassuring these owners that hikers aren’t always a scourge on their land, and that the world deserves to see and appreciate Aotearoa in its entirety.

When I lived in India and Australia, I’d often see swathes of private property fenced off with stern signs that trespassers will be frowned upon and prosecuted. I hated that. I yearned for a world where roaming is a basic right and passing through is welcome—as long as you behave responsibly.

It’s a naive thought. There’s no country in the world that will allow random humans to walk onto and through other people’s property without explicit invitation.

Which is why Te Araroa is special. Anyone is allowed to walk through 1200 kilometres of private property without the fear of retribution.

However, that doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want on that property. There are rules, written and unwritten. There are protocols, best practices, and basic human decency principles that every walker is expected to follow.

My past self would’ve raised eyebrows at this. I would’ve vehemently argued that land should not be “owned” by private individuals because it’s for everyone to appreciate and enjoy. The land-owning few enforcing rules on the rest of us seemed like a moral wrong to me—especially when the land has been around for far longer than humans.

In the last few years, however, my perspective has shifted.

I still strongly believe that we don’t own the land; the land owns us. I believe that humanity has wasted itself by conjuring rules and regulations around who owns which part of land and for how long.

But now, I also believe that people who’ve invested their life in serving and conserving the land have the right to protect it against pests, humans and otherwise.

I will never let a horse, however sweet and charismatic, into my garden patch of broad beans. It’ll destroy the integrity of the land. I have a responsibility to my broadies and that means keeping out anything that might harm the life of the land.

Everyone who cares for land in the same way has the same responsibility. As soon as I realised that, I understood that this what native land titles were all about—not to carve up land for use and abuse but to treat the land with the respect and grace it deserves. First Nations people embody this. I’ve never heard an Indigenous person talk about land ownership as an entitlement. They talk about it as a responsibility and an honour to stand guard.

Australians have a habit of starting every event and gathering with an acknowledgement to Country. It goes something like this: “We acknowledge the [name of native tribe] people, the original custodians of the lands that we’re meeting on today.” Australia didn’t respect the Original Custodians or the Country in its long, brutal, and bloody Colonial history. Even today, native land title is a heated topic in parliaments and dinner tables across the country. Despite that irony, the script reflects something meaningful. We so often unthinkingly utter those words, like a chore almost—but they show the true depth of native land rights.

The land always owns us—not the other way round. But there has also always existed a group of custodians who take on the heavy burden of nurturing the land, and living on the land long after the passers by are gone. So they should have a say in whether and how rest of us can walk through the land.

So when I say Te Araroa is special, it’s because these people—both native title holders and those who bought property under the modern ways of life—have come to agree to share their homes and back yards with the rest of the world. With no expectation other than we leave it as we find it.

Photos of The Escarpment Track, a 10km trail in Wellington, NZ. This trail forms a part of Te Araroa.