After three weeks on the road, I hadn’t managed to make any progress on the question I had set out to answer, but I had learned something. Not so much about me, in particular, although there were quite a few realisations, but about life and the world in general. The most important thing might have been a duality, the realisation of how vast, yet, at the same time, how small the world was.

During those three weeks, I had been walking most of the time, heading from one planned rest-spot to the next, at times spending ten hours on the road. Altogether, my efforts had taken me some four-hundred kilometres away from home, the distance walked somewhat longer, as I hadn’t been able to go in a straight line. And yet, if I got into trouble, got injured or something like that, I knew I could call my parents and, within just a couple hours, they could come and get me. The marvels of modern technology, how small they had turned the world.

Or maybe I should call it the marvels of human ingenuity, one of the days I hadn’t been walking, mostly to get some laundry done, I had been able to do a little sight-seeing. One of the things I went to see was the local cathedral and there, I had been reminded that humans had managed feats far beyond the physical capacities of their bodies for hundreds, in other parts of the world thousands, of years. Even the strongest human, purely with their physical body, was limited to lift a few hundred kilograms, assuming perfect distribution of weight and so on.

Yet, by using pulleys, cleverly applying leverage and other force-multipliers, humans had been able to move stones weighing far more than any individual, or even a group of individuals without those methods, could move, using them to build their monuments. Sure, it was a monument to a religion I didn’t believe in but, at the same time, it was a monument to human capability.

Some said that we were standing on the shoulders of giants, allowing us to see the world. But did we really? Wasn’t every advance, every idea that was tested, just another grain of sand, on the mountain we called knowledge? It gave me a wholly new appreciation for the pure, curiosity-driven hunger my mother had displayed so often, which my brother had inherited. They wanted to create just one more grain of sand, just to raise that metaphorical mountain a little higher.

Standing on a literal mountain, albeit a small one, let me see out into the low-lands, observing the various displays of human civilization. The towns and cities, railroads and highways, the hundreds of thousands of people who were living their lives. All, within the sight of my eyes. It was majestic and humbling.

My path south, towards the Alps, had led me to a relatively low mountain-range, leaving me with a choice, to either walk around it, adding almost a week to my journey, or to go across it. I had chosen to wander across, mostly because it seemed like an adventure but also because I had to get used to climbing anyway. If I wanted to get to Italy, I would have to traverse the Alps, which would be a challenge, just a few weeks down the road.

Climbing the mountains was no great challenge, the climb did slow me down but there was no difficulty, not with well-maintained roads, clearly marked with signs and straight-forward. But I had decided to make it a little more interesting for me, by planning a route that wouldn’t take me from town to town. Instead, I was taking the direct route, which meant a night of sleeping beneath the stars. It had been a whimsical decision, born from a desire to truly see the stars, away from the light-pollution that blotted them out in the cities and towns. For that was the flipside of human advancement, of the monuments of our civilization. After becoming the dominant species, we had adapted the environment to us, not adapted ourselves to the environment.

Getting off the beaten path a little, I had found a nice, relatively large, clearing, where I had decided to make my camp for the night. When night had fallen, the hills and mountains, together with the forest, had turned the night truly dark, without any nearby artificial lights. There were still signs of civilization, the swiftly-moving lights high in the sky, some of them distant aeroplanes, others maybe satellites. I wasn’t able to tell the difference but I really didn’t care. What I was marvelling at wasnt human civilization, it was something bigger, bigger than any man, woman or child on this pale, blue dot, as a scientist had once put it.

For once, I was able to truly see the night sky, the canopy of stars, far above.

Images of a star-lit sky filled my mind, when I finally crawled into my tent and went to sleep.