The Unfinished Map

I keep a small, brass compass in my desk drawer that no longer points north. Its needle trembles with a frantic, aimless energy, as if it has forgotten the magnetic pull of the world and is searching for a destination that has long since vanished. My grandfather carried it through mountain passes that do not appear on modern maps, places where the air was thin enough to taste like iron. He used to say that the point of a journey is not to arrive, but to lose the certainty of where you began. We spend our lives trying to draw straight lines across the messy, shifting terrain of our own histories, hoping that if we move fast enough, the landscape will finally make sense. But the earth is restless, and the paths we carve are often erased by the very wind that guided us there. What remains when the map is folded away and the needle stops spinning?

Naba Kumar Mondal has captured this feeling of constant motion in his work titled Journey. It reminds me that we are all just passing through, leaving only the faintest trace behind. Does the road look different to you when you realize you are only a guest upon it?