Three-year old Humna was my first friend in the mountainous region of Hunza, Pakistan. When I went for my evening prayers, she came and sat beside me with the biggest smile and a curiosity about the new stranger in her neighbourhood. We introduced ourselves to each other, and from then on, she has made it a daily ritual to come to say hello to me in and around the streets of Altit.

Yesterday, she found me on her way home from school, so I asked if I could meet her mother. We walked through the narrow stone-built alleys to Humna’s home, where her family welcomed me with open arms and served me dawdo, a type of traditional soup.

This is what a typical day looks like for me in Gilgit-Baltistan, filled with a sense of community and discovery, a context far-removed from my excessively calculated life in Toronto.

Until now, I have only ever lived in large cities or suburbs where the pace of life, especially in North America, has been little more than a blur of neverending meetings, long subway commutes, and colourfully blocked online calendars. “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” T.S. Eliot’s words leave their legacy well-beyond a century of consumerism. Time is money was my indoctrination, and productivity my benchmark of self-worth.

The idea of showing up to a friend or neighbour’s house without an e-vite rsvp at least three weeks prior – hell, calling someone on the phone without a warning – was considered highly intrusive! The majority of daily small-talk was a mediocre exchange of “How are you?”, followed by an autopilot response of, “You know, just super busy.”

So, my newfound exposure to more remote and rural social environments is hard to process and brings with it mixed feelings of relief and guilt. Hunza has power outages of up to 22 hours a day and unreliable Internet access. The ensuing frustration calls for a forced reprieve of sorts: I’ve been trying to upload a video for the past three days – I give up! Deadlines become elusive, Zoom calls are reduced to apologetic emails, the Netflix subscription is replaced by a used book that’s been gathering dust on my reading list, and the search for “connectivity” refers to an entirely out-of-this world experience against the backdrop of the snow-capped Himalayas.

I have the extraordinary privilege of knowing that these challenges are for me, temporary, which allows me the luxury of leaning into and learning from the opportunity to be more present in my surroundings, to make new friends, to dare I say, show up to a neighbour’s home unannounced! Here, I know that there is always somewhere to crash for the night, to find a warm cup of soup for my sore throat, and a story waiting to be found on its own time and at its own pace.