I chose to climb.
The ruins at Hampi stretch across a landscape almost the size of ancient Rome — boulder-strewn, vast, and only partially reachable by car. To see the cliff-side temples, to get close enough to read the decorative carvings on ancient stone walls, to stand where a 15th-century empire once stood and look out across that landscape — you have to walk.
I had gout in my left foot. Every step on uneven ground cost me something real.
I climbed anyway. Because you don’t fly to South India and stay in the car.
But here’s what I remember most about those first days: I wasn’t fully present for any of it. Not because of the pain — I could manage the pain. I was absent because I was simultaneously managing everything else. The next day’s logistics. The transportation I’d arranged. Whether the accommodations I’d booked were actually what I’d been told they were. Whether my planning — meticulous, systematic, the kind I’d applied to billion-dollar programs — was going to hold up in a country I didn’t actually understand yet.
It didn’t. Not really. India doesn’t yield to that kind of control. I was carrying the weight of a planning apparatus I wasn’t experienced enough to run in this context, on top of an aching foot, in 90-degree heat, surrounded by one of the most extraordinary landscapes I’d ever seen.
I had confused controlling the experience with having it.
The temples were magnificent. I know that intellectually. I have the photographs.
But I was somewhere else.
Have you ever worked so hard to manage something that you couldn’t actually be present for it?
Talenton 