The Weight of Moving Forward
It is 3:14 am. The house is holding its breath, and I am staring at the wall, wondering why we are so obsessed with the idea of arrival. We spend our lives measuring the distance between where we are and where we think we need to be. We treat the act of moving as a chore, a necessary friction to get from one point of exhaustion to the next. But there is a strange, quiet violence in the way we force ourselves forward. We walk past our own lives, eyes fixed on the pavement, counting steps as if they were debts being paid off. Is there ever a moment where the movement itself is enough? Or are we just running away from the stillness that waits for us when we finally stop? The rhythm of a footfall is a heartbeat, yet we treat it like a clock. I wonder if the ground ever grows tired of carrying us toward things we don’t even want.
Fidan Nazim Qizi has captured this exact tension in her work titled A Walking Man. It reminds me that even in the most ordinary stride, there is a heavy, unspoken question about where we are actually going. Does the path ever truly end, or do we just get better at pretending it does?
