The Weight of Leaving

We are always in transit. Between the arrival and the departure, there is a space where the self thins out. It is not quite being here, and not yet being there. We carry the dust of the road in our clothes, the echoes of a thousand voices in our ears, yet we walk alone. The crowd is a river, and we are merely the water moving through it. There is a specific exhaustion that comes with the end of a great gathering, a quiet settling of the soul when the noise finally recedes. We leave behind the places that changed us, or perhaps we leave behind the people we were when we first arrived. The path ahead is blurred by the speed of our own restlessness. Does the road remember the feet that pressed into it, or does it simply wait for the next set of shadows to pass?

Nirupam Roy has captured this fleeting transition in the image titled Returning From Kumbha. The blur of the crowd suggests a world that refuses to stand still for us. How much of ourselves do we leave behind when we move on?