My GPS diligently tracked the 905 km that I walked between two of Australia’s major cities and a pedometer counted each and every humble but persistent act of putting one foot in front of another a total of 1,281,772 times.

The continuous thick line in Fig. 5.1 shows the route I chose for my walk from Melbourne to Sydney.

Fig. 5.1
figure 1

Anatomy of a pilgrimage

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The names of the towns I stopped in and the places I passed through have been left out to focus on the spurs coming off the walking route. These are pathways of the pilgrimage that appear to sprout out of nowhere; points along the walk that come and go, diverge, converge, connect and separate. They seem abstract, yet at times are almost physical.

I’ll give you one example to explain these spurs. On one occasion as I approached the outskirts of a town, I caught up with a man a few metres in front of me walking at a more relaxed pace. As I passed him, I could see from the corner of my eye that he sped up to keep up with me; it was as if he wanted to make sure he was actually seeing what he thought he was seeing.

He seemed puzzled by my two backpacks, walking sticks, boots and overall attire which contrasted with the relaxed, laidback feel of the beachside town I was approaching. By this stage of my journey, I was used to people staring at me, so continued walking.

Eventually he asked:

  • “Hey, where are you going?”

  • “Sydney”, I replied.

  • “Fuck me!” he said stopping in his tracks as if the response had stumped him.

I lumbered along and several steps later he asked:

  • “And where’d you come from?”

  • “Melbourne” I said over my shoulder.

  • “Fuck me!” he said again.

I figured then that I must have been, from a theoretical viewpoint, halfway to where I was going and where I had come from. Ridiculously far from where I started and from where I was going. However, in terms of my physical walk I was entering Narooma, in southern New South Wales, and had already covered about two thirds of the distance from Melbourne to Sydney.

As I walked, I replayed the encounter in my mind swapping my salty-mouthed fellow walker for Zeno, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher:

  • Zeno: “So, Sydney you say? Are you aware that if you are ever to arrive in Sydney you must first walk halfway there?”

  • Me: “Yes, Zeno. Catch you later.”

  • Zeno: “But wait… Are you aware that before you reach the halfway point you must first walk a quarter of the way there?”

  • Me: “Yep! And I won’t get there by chatting, so…adios amigo.”

  • Zeno: “No, no, wait! Before you get to a quarter of the way you must have covered one-eighth, before that, one sixteenth and so on...”

He would then pull out a piece of paper and scribble an equation to show me, Fig. 5.2:

Fig. 5.2
figure 2

Zeno’s scribble. Though the scribble mathematically represents his idea, such notation was not established back then. Zeno didn’t speak English, either

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  • Zeno: “See, you need to arrive at an infinite number of intermediate points, so you will never arrive in Sydney! Travel over any distance can be neither completed nor begun, and so all motion must be an illusion.”

  • Me: “Fuck me!”

Two millennia after his death, great thinkers are still working on solutions to Zeno’s motion paradoxes. It has entertained the minds of Aristoteles, Archimedes and more recently the philosopher, logician and Nobel Laureate, Bertrand Russell [7].

The pilgrimage I was on was held together by a particular type of logic. It was not the kind of logic that teaches us to explain what we already know, but to paraphrase Descartes, the kind which allows us to direct our reasoning with a view to discovering truths of which we are ignorant [8].