On 26 August, high in the Himalayas, a mass of ice and rock broke away from the slope of Langtang Lirung. The flow travelled nearly a hundred kilometres down the Lhende, the Bhote Koshi and the Trishuli, sweeping away villages, bridges and the border crossing at Gyirong.
Rasuwa is precisely the corridor people pass through on their way to Kailash and to Lake Gosaikunda. Many of those missing were travellers.
I am not going to write about the disaster here. I am going to write about something it opens up for anyone who has ever looked at a photograph of a distant sacred place and felt something turn over in their chest.
That feeling is familiar to far more people than we admit. Some call it a calling. Others call it a dream of travelling. Others still simply collect photographs in a folder on their phone and tell themselves: one day.
Distance promises something quite specific: that over there a person becomes someone else. That seven thousand kilometres away the air is different, the skin between you and something larger thins out, and you will finally feel what stubbornly refuses to be felt here.
The promise is real. There are places that work. Kailash, Gosaikunda, Mount Athos, Santiago de Compostela, Medjugorje, the Rila Monastery, Krastova Gora. For centuries thousands of people came there with one and the same question and each of them left a little of their attention behind. You step into a field that was ready long before you arrived.
Only travel does another kind of work too, one that is rarely mentioned. When you leave, you leave your role behind. Nobody there knows what you do for a living, whose daughter you are, who is waiting for you at home and what is expected of you on Thursday afternoon. For two or three weeks you become simply a person with a rucksack and bad sleep on the bus. In that emptiness something can speak, because for the first time in years there is nobody to drown it out.
That is why so many people fall in love with travelling and start repeating it. It genuinely does work. The question is which work exactly, and whether it is the one you paid for.
At an airport, on the same flight, sit two people with identical tickets.
The first carries a question. Something in his life has settled and he wants to look at it from a distance, in a different light, without the phone and without the people who already have opinions on the matter. He is leaving towards something.
The second carries a weight. Home has become unbearable, a conversation has been postponed for eight months, the person beside him has chosen to live in silence, and at work every Monday begins with the same tightening. He is leaving away from something.
Both are human. Nobody owes an explanation for buying a ticket.
The difference shows on the return. The first comes home different, because he carried the question with him and somewhere along the way he got an answer. The second comes home the same, only more tanned and three thousand leva poorer, because the weight travelled with him in the hand luggage the entire time. Sacred places accept questions. Suitcases they do not accept.
There is one quiet sign by which the second kind is recognised. The thought of leaving brings relief. The thought of returning brings a tightening under the ribs. If that is familiar, the journey was solving an entirely different question. The question itself stayed home, made itself comfortable and is waiting for you to come back.
A woman in Sofia has been planning India for four years. She has a list of ashrams, she follows ticket prices, she knows which month is best. Meanwhile she has spent three years postponing a conversation with her sister, whom she has not spoken to since the inheritance. India is beautiful and an entirely genuine dream. Only every time the conversation with her sister comes closer, the wish for India grows inexplicably strong.
A man sets out on the Camino de Santiago. Eight hundred kilometres on foot, thirty-five days. He comes back changed, genuinely changed, and tells everyone. Five weeks later his life looks exactly as it did before he left, along with the job he hated and the decision he still did not make. The road changed him for the duration of the road.
A woman goes on a retreat in Bali. Ten days of silence, sunrises, food without sugar. On the eighth day she understands why she has been choosing the same men for years. She comes home with that knowledge, shares it with two friends, and then life does its work and two months later the insight has settled somewhere between the bills and the shopping list. It was entirely true. There was simply nobody to pick it up after the landing.
The three stories have one thing in common. In each there is a real question that set off with the person, came back with the person, and was given no place to continue.
Answer quickly. The first answer is the true one; the second has already been through editing.
If the journey fell through tomorrow, what would you feel first? Loss says you were leaving towards something. Panic says you were leaving away from something and the door has just closed.
What do you want to leave there? If you can name it in one word, you already know what you are looking for. If you cannot, the search has not begun yet and the ticket will take you to a very beautiful place from which you will send the same messages.
Who is waiting when you come back? This question usually hurts most and works best.
If the answers confused you more than they reassured you, that is a good sign. It means there is something to look at. The Crossroads is the room for a moment like this — it examines both paths as they are, before you have paid for one of them.
If you would rather arrive at the same place through an image than through questions, there is also a test. Six pictures — a mountain temple, a bus at dawn, a suspension bridge, a prayer wheel, a room with a window onto the peaks, and a road descending towards the lights of a village. You choose one without weighing which is prettiest, and it shows you what you are looking for far from home. Every result ends with a practice, a meditation or a small ritual.
The place helps because it has been gathering attention for centuries, and that is noticeable from the threshold. The things that make the experience work, however, are three, and each of them is available from here.
Silence in which nobody will interrupt you for at least half an hour. Stepping out of your role, even briefly. And a question you bring with you, instead of leaving it in the drawer with the other postponed things.
Thousands of kilometres make those three conditions much easier. They are created, though, by the person who decided to have them. In Kathmandu there are people who have been in the same spot for fifteen years and still have not begun. In Lyulin there are people who began one Tuesday evening, without telling anyone.
FatedWays is a transformational game built around one simple idea. The question you come in with deserves to be looked at more than once and from more than one side.
The spiral has sixty-four fields across seven levels tied to the seven chakras. On every field your question passes through Tarot, a rune, the I Ching and an Archangel message, and depending on the place a Kabbalistic message, a short ritual or a task for the day may appear. The different systems look at one and the same thing from different angles, and at a certain point they start pointing at the same place. That is when it becomes worth looking closely.
If your question is “Should I go?”, the game will not tell you yes or no. The earthly thread will steer you towards entirely practical things — deadlines, money, who takes the dog, how many days off you actually have. The soul thread will ask something else: “What will you have to leave here if you really do go?” or “When did you last give yourself three days with nobody looking for you?”
The Mirror can turn the direction around entirely. If you came in with “Will I find myself in India?”, it may ask you: “What in your life here has to stay unexamined for you to need India?” The answer stays with you, nobody grades it and there is no correct version. There is honest and less honest.
And then the game remembers. It remembers what you asked, what you answered and which themes you keep returning to. The Traces of Fate connect separate moments that look entirely unrelated on their own. It may turn out that the question about travelling, the question about work four months ago and the question about that person are one and the same question, arriving each time in different clothes.
The game is the place where the journey carries on after you have come home.
Every year thousands of journeys fall apart. A visa, money, a diagnosis, a divorce, work, a child, a closed border. This week — an entire mountain corridor that is simply gone.
The first thought at a moment like that is always the same: so it was not meant to be.
Be careful with it. Sometimes it is accurate. Far more often it is a convenient way of not looking. The closed road cancels the journey and that is all. The question stays whole, comes back into your hands and brings one task: find another way.
Sometimes the other way turns out to be better. The journey would have given you three weeks of distance from your life. The cancelled journey gives you the same question here, where everything is visible up close and there is nowhere to run from it. It is less comfortable. And it works faster.
If something has closed and you are still gripping it with both hands, Letting Go is exactly for that. If you are wondering whether what happened was a sign, Signs shows how a sign is read, without inventing meaning where there is simply a coincidence. And if you sense that one and the same obstacle keeps returning in different forms, Karma looks at precisely that kind of repetition.
Kailash will stay where it is. The roads will be built again, as they always have been. Rasuwa will recover and in a few years buses will pass through it again, carrying people who saved up for that journey.
Meanwhile the question you want to go for is here. It has been here all along and it is going nowhere. The journey would have done one single thing — shown it to you more clearly, because over there nobody drowns it out.
You can hear it from here too. You need one question, a little silence, and the readiness to hear an answer you may not much like.
FatedWays is available in eight languages and can be added to your phone's home screen as an app. The first seven days are free, with no bank card.
Yes. Centuries of gathered attention leave a trace and it is felt. The place, though, amplifies what you bring with you. Bring a question and you will get an answer. Bring an escape and you will get lovely photographs and the same life on landing.
Look at which way the relief points. If the thought of leaving brings relief and the thought of returning brings a tightening, that is running. There is no verdict here. It is simply useful to know what you are doing, so that you are not surprised later that nothing has changed.
Sometimes. More often it is a circumstance. A sign is recognised by repeating and by pointing in a particular direction. A one-off obstacle stays an obstacle. In Signs there are concrete criteria for that difference.
Travel helps because it lifts you out of your role. The same effect comes from silence, an honest question and the willingness to stay with the answer for more than three minutes. The difference is the price of the ticket.
As an experience, never. The Himalayas are the Himalayas. What the game does better is the continuation: it remembers your question after you have come home and keeps working with it, while the insight from the eighth day in Bali usually lasts about two months.
What they need right now is entirely concrete — food, water, a roof. The World Food Programme is working on the ground.
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