Yo‘l

I can take a long time to get ready. I think things over, weigh them up, estimate the difficulties, and dozens of possible roads pass through me while I sit still. And then, before I understand where I am being carried, I rush forward. Both extremes have long lived in me, and I wrote the words “Yur, yur, yur. To‘xtama yur” - “Go, go, go. Don’t stop” above all for myself.

For me the road also exists quite literally. Two or three hundred kilometres behind the wheel on a winding mountain road, forest outside the window, the light changing. Thought moves differently on a road like that: what seemed unsolvable at home loses its hardness, and sometimes for a whole stretch you stop thinking altogether and later cannot remember how you drove it. You arrive at the same place, but already a little different. Another album of mine, “730 Kilometres”, was born from journeys like these, but that is another story.

I remember the hero of a film who ran across the whole country for years, and people joined him. And then he stopped and went home. I recognised myself. It has happened to me, halfway along, to realise that I no longer need to go where I was heading. To stop is not always a defeat. Sometimes it is honesty. “Manzil yo‘q, faqat harakat” - “There is no destination, there is only movement”. I have never decided for myself which matters more, the path or the goal. Sometimes the goal. And sometimes the way you changed along the road, whom you met and what you learned turn out to be worth more than what you set out for. A goal reached is rarely an end. More often it is a resting place where you can catch your breath and go on. I need a goal bigger than my life: one where you do not know whether you will have the strength and the time to see it. Beside such a goal you have to learn and change before you ever arrive.

In Attar, the birds travel through seven valleys to the king Simurgh, and only thirty reach him. At the end they recognise themselves in the radiance of the Simurgh: Attar plays on the name’s likeness to the Persian “si murgh” - “thirty birds”. For me this is also a story about a road that changes the one who walks it. In the Qur’an, those who looked but did not see are asked: have they not travelled through the land, so that their hearts might learn to understand? And the Khwajagan Sufis taught nazar bar qadam: to watch your own step, without being distracted by everything that hinders the walk.

“Men yo‘qman, faqat safarman” - “I am not, there is only the journey”. I do not know what I will be when I arrive. I know that while I walk, I am. I will have to stop again, or turn, admit that there is something I cannot do, and ask for help. But for now I begin with what I can. One step.