I've just skated from Sengkang to Bishan on a rickety Decathlon pennyboard. The road was about ten kilometres long. To come back from such a journey and immediately start writing is an incredible thrill. Like hitting the ground running. All writing is a series of steps, you see… a procedural experience where one thing leads to another. One thought leads to another, following a series of roads in the mind. The roads have been constructed beforehand but their terrain is undetermined. It is the stuff all journeys are made of: 10% confidence in the structure of things, 90% wayfinding. You see, on the way back I had lost the use of my smartphone and realised, staring at the signs around me, that I was not as lost as I thought I'd been; I held within my head a little of the land I was born in, a little of those streets I had come to know (despite never having travelled on them) by heart. So I took turn after turn and straight after straight, and I came to realise that that process was perhaps very similar to writing, or at least how I had come to imagine it; thus began the seeds of this essay.

John Berger, a writer of admirable simplicity, provides a metaphor of this process as "confabulation". In 'Self-Portrait' he delivers (through a similarly meandering series of musings) an outline: one word encounters another, swimming in the silent Mother Tongue words share, and the encounter produces a sentence. A sentence encounters paper; then encounters eye and brain. They mix with other sensibilities of tone and rhythm. Edits are made. From there, another confabulation begins.

I like that image of storytelling. Storytelling is a process of words telling stories to each other, mingling to make other stories. It's wonderfully fractal. On my way back I liked the way the path home lead unflinchingly towards familiar landmarks and roads I had associated with each other in my mind, following a grand direction - yet each road branched into further lengths and breaks, meanders and ways, and in each instant the segment of road beneath me branched further still into the subtleties of texture: was it concrete or asphalt? Was it narrow or wide? In which direction did it slope, and was my momentum enough to overcome it? All these considerations could not have been taken into account in the heat of the moment, as one considers a calculation. It all just becomes a part of space and the body. So, too, are confabulations made out of smaller confabulations whose sum is not apparent in the moment of writing; whose magnitude is only apparent at the end.

That's what Berger was trying for, I think; that's what fuels his essays. To tread, unflinchingly, step after step, on surface that continues without breaking: taken abstractedly, what I have described is also a process of being-with the world. So Berger's writing carries with it a seemingly un-self-aware air that I have come to consider a process of being-with: the text being-with itself, of Berger being-with his own mind. The words walk a path of their own. They seem surprised when they get there. Where 'there' is, anyhow, is only visible as a faint line in the tops of the trees. Or a slight inclination of a hill at the end of the road. I find myself probing the terrain, learning to listen to my body like Berger listened to the stories of his words: here's a steep uphill I can climb, promising two-hundred-odd metres of unbroken, gentle, track; there's where the tree roots have warped and bulged the pavement at regular intervals, where the board can gently coast under my feet. At some points the ground appears liquid, like a sea. But the journey has been decided by the geography long before I have even begun. A trust in terrain is required to move from point A to point B, just as one trusts in the trajectory of the mind. Encountering the essay form beyond the confines of the Institution, I am trying to teach myself a theory of the trajectory of the mind, starting with Berger, a pennyboard, and the kinematics of travel.

A part of those kinematics has to do with embodying the end. Specifically, encountering the end gives one a sense of just how wide the arc in which one has dwelt to travel there. Seeing the top floor of my apartment over the crest of a hill and understanding just how much effort it has taken to get there over hills and drains, past many busy roads. Distance becomes different when one has to travel it on foot. It stitches the land together into a shape I can feel. The rise and fall of the road beneath my feet. It reflects the motion required in writing. I used to think of it as a magnitude of effort but now I prefer to think of it as a vector. Specifically as direction. I think now that good writing should never betray the magnitude of effort needed to bring it together. Instead it should embody the series of vectors that have made it what it is. A series of fractal meanders that move one point to another under the gentle effort of the body and natural laws.

I enjoyed that last part of my journey greatly. At some point the approaching angle was still unfamiliar, seeing my house from a different angle, but the terrain under the ground was the same. I took a photograph of reeds under flowing water as it passed under the bridge and it reminded me of my own passing wake, or the wakes of each person I knew as they passed through my life; the rushing water reminded me of love. Moving through the world is also an act of love towards the world. As is moving through texts, following their tongues. Trusting the following to bring us to closure: to trust the path (its meander, its gravity) to bring us faithfully to rest.