There is something odd about trekking into the wild. You either go all in, or you won’t enjoy the trip.

Your subconscious should forget all the worldly deals and focus entirely on the moment as it is, the feeling of immensity when clouds stitch into the peaks, the birds sing into the rhythm of the wind, and the rivers argue endlessly with the rocks.

That is the deal the trekking offers. It is not a negotiable one. But I did not hold up my end.

My father and I hiked through Kyrgyzstan last weekend. We went to the Lenin base camp, stayed in cottages around Kara-Koi, and visited Sary-Chelek, a valley full of lakes so blue that it looked computer-generated.

Most of the time, the air smelled of rain, but the rain never came. We played volleyball with the Sherpa¹ men at the Lenin base. The air was so thin that any reasonably long cardio would cause you to faint immediately. We tried qymyz, the fermented mare’s milk the steppe people have lived on for centuries, and my body registered an immediate rejection. We rode horses for a few hours through terrain that looked like the nature drawings from my kindergarten. On the evenings, to the backdrop of the Milky Way above us, my dad and I enjoyed drinks on the panoramic balcony of our cottage and talked about God, purpose, stoicism, and how a man was supposed to live.

All of it was right there, in front of me, unhurried and kind. But I was, somewhere in the back of my mind, still sitting at a desk in Agora’s office, turning over emails I had not answered and business I had left half-done.

The strange thing is that those dealings did not actually need me. They could wait. Nothing would collapse for a few days of absence. The world wouldn’t even notice I was gone. But I noticed that I was not quite gone, and that is the problem.

When you carry your unfinished business into a place like Sary-Chelek, you are not really at Sary-Chelek. You are at some uncomfortable midpoint between two places, not present enough to enjoy where you are, not focused enough to solve what you were supposed to leave behind. You get the worst of both.

What I should have understood before leaving is that a trip is not a pause in your life. It is a different thing entirely, with its own demands and its own logic, and it asks for your full attention the way any serious thing would.

The mountains do not offer half an experience. The qymyz does not offer half a taste. The Sherpa men at the Lenin base did not play half a game of volleyball. Everything there was whole and immediate. I was the only thing that felt in-whole.

Next time, the emails can wait. The business can wait. Everything in Tashkent can wait, because it always does anyway. The mountains will not.