Suppose I were to ask you to take a trip with me.
“To where?” you might ask.
“Around the world,” I reply.
Your questions follow. “Which direction? How long will it take? Will we get to see all the continents? How are we traveling?”
My answers: “Whichever direction you’d like. As long as you’d like. Sure, if you’d like. By foot.”
Our theoretical conversation is not likely to inspire confidence. Aside from the obvious problems associated with geography (there are large bodies of water to traverse), weather (it gets really hot and cold in some places), and logistics (they don’t make backpacks big enough for such travel), I have presented no itinerary or budget. And I have proposed that we, uh, er, um, that we … well … that we walk.
What?
You are quickly recalculating my sanity, your eyes searching my words for a glimmer of reason, so I offer you an even more astounding observation: “I’ve already done it twice, you know. It’s not as difficult as you may think.”
I have, actually. And it’s not, honestly. In fact, you may have already completed one or more trips yourself.
Here’s how. The circumference of the earth is just under 25,000 miles. Given that an average person takes almost 7000 steps a day, it is possible for anyone who lives a typical human lifespan to walk the equivalent of two or three global circumnavigations.
The calculation left me, at first, nonplussed. Wow. That’s a lot of steps. Then I thought about all the small journeys in a single day, the shuffling from one room to another, the purposeless meandering and the purposeful plodding, the traverses of hardwood, pavements, sidewalks, and fields, and I realized how strange that all that movement, most circular and without directionality, adds up, that if you stack it all together it amounts to the equivalent of one or more earths in a human lifetime.
It is important to note that we are discussing averages. Some people have longer legs. Some do not have functioning legs; my father wheeled rather than walked his way through most of his life. But he, and others, still accomplished their fair share of journeying.
Just think how far we might get, individually and together, if we adopted the mindset of alignment, of direction, of purpose?
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu is credited with the expression “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. Little matter that Lao Tzu put in writing what perhaps generations before him shared through oral tradition. The point is that we have long realized, as a conscious race of bipeds, that incremental change makes a difference. And we have celebrated the prudence and potential associated with the cultivation of that awareness and the providential power inherent and immanent in its enactment in human personal and social activities. Where we struggle, however, is trusting the process. We want, and seem to need, assurances. We are too easily distracted by the steps themselves to maintain focus on the cumulative impact of those steps. Little can blossom to great, if nurtured, if valued, if believed. Seeds become great trees, ideas become social movements, commitments become stirring stories of the commonplace transformed to the extraordinary – if only we nurture them, if only we share them, if only we live them on a daily, hourly, and even minute-by-minute basis.
Uncertainty can really stink. Am I worth anything and do I make a difference? Are you worth something more and do you make a greater or lesser difference? Our globe has been spinning through space for billions of years. Since life was born, it has been under continual threat. I am convinced that the essence of people who have died has not been extinguished. But daily I am confronted with tales of woe, reason for despair, evidence of the intermittent unworthiness of human existence. I peer into the eyes of my loving four-legged dog and cat and I begrudge them their ability to accept, to be, to not (perhaps) think about tomorrow, or yesterday, or broad sweeps of history stretched behind this present moment or poised unrealized before it. They live. They yearn. They stretch. They rest in the warmth of the afternoon sun and the respite of timelessness nestled within tranquil naps and narrow-eyed stares into the world just outside the glass windows of our home. They are not burdened by the capacity to calculate the number of steps taken in a lifetime. Their focus, from what I can tell, is now – especially if that now is close to another meal, or a nap, or an ear scratch, or a walk.
Ah, again, the walk. The steps. The physical ability, either through motor movements of our bodies or power-assisted resources of our technology, to propel ourselves forward. The mental ability to do so through intentions, purpose. The spiritual ability to bring tiny influence and impact through better thoughts, less selfish decisions, and small acts of otherness.
Which is what kindness is: otherness. It is me getting past myself, just enough, to see you, to listen to you, to realize that the divine, if and as it exists in this world, has as much spark and flame within you as it may have in me, probably more, when I consider how lazy I can sometimes feel, how tired, how indifferent. It is the indifference that is the poison. Sure, I may feel fatigued yet how ungrateful it is for me to use weariness as an excuse for indifference, for turning away from others’ pain, for forgetting that the journey of each human circumnavigation of the world begins with the first roll of a newborn, the first crawl of a baby, the first step of a toddler. We are driven to move forward; it is in our genetic code. We are capable of helping others do the same; it is in our life code.
There is so much noise in the world today, yes, so much acrimony, hate (real and feigned), and judgment. Yet there is also so much potential. We are a species capable of walking around our earthly world! Together, five of us accrue enough steps in our lifetimes to walk to the moon. As a species, we have even traversed the galaxy and beyond with our accumulated footfall. Imagine what more is possible if we only turn our collective thoughts towards common goals and purpose. Our thoughts – each of us has an estimated 25,000 of them a day, eerily similar to the number of miles in the earth’s circumference. If each thought was a step, every human has enough to awake in the morning, turn east, and journey through the joys and needs of the entire planet by the time we close our eyes at night for sleep. Suppose only one thousand of those daily thoughts were turned towards others. Suppose we learned how to share, with one another, a mere one hundred of those otherness-oriented notions. What might we accomplish if we focused on alignment rather than competition, on the whole instead of its parts?
We can travel far, oh so far, if we only remember that we have a choice on where we go and how we travel. Will you take the journey with me? I’m all packed. So, I hope, are you.