Walking with nowhere to be

In the evenings the walking paths of Jeddah fill with people who are not going anywhere.

They loop the same stretch, past the same benches, and finish exactly where they began. Nobody would call that a failure to arrive. Arriving was never the plan. The walk was the plan.

A lot of work is quietly confused about which kind of walk it is.

A man starts fixing phones from a small stall in the evenings because he has a debt to clear. That is a destination. One month the debt is gone. It would be perfectly sensible to stop there, or at least to stop straining: keep the regulars, keep the hours he can bear, and give his evenings back to his family. Most people do not. The target simply moves, and the same strain carries on towards a number that was never the reason.

The man at the next stall started for a different reason. He likes taking things apart. He likes the customer who walks away with a working screen, and the slow improvement in his own hands. There is no finish line for him, because there was never meant to be one. Giving him a target would only turn a pleasure into a chore.

Both are fine. The trouble comes from mixing them up: the person chasing a destination who will not admit he has reached it, and the person enjoying the road who keeps telling himself he has somewhere to be.

If you were going somewhere, it is worth noticing when you get there. And if the going was the reason all along, there is no need to invent a place to arrive.