Smock Blogs

Heard this once from a friend working with the SF in Afghanistan: about to board a C-130, and during the safety brief, they were told in the event of a crash, find a hole big enough to walk through, and then run until you felt stupid.

Want to walk 1,000 miles? Start with a single step. Works for me, or it has, at least the concept, that I just need to take whatever it is I’m doing one step at a time. That I’ve broken the task down into manageable pieces, and if I just keep on stepping, then I’ll go 1,000 miles.

Except I start to think about that 1,000 miles, and whether I can go that many miles, and the answer is I can’t, or I haven’t, but I can go one step. And most days, that’s the journey. All I can handle, manage, produce.

It’s that last word that always throws me the hardest, to produce. Be productive. Contributing my efforts to society. Or at least to the bank account.

It’s why we measure journeys in all their miles, not the single step, because we are driven by quantity, by metrics, by this idea that if we can’t enumerate our contributions, we are somehow less valuable than our productive peers.

We don’t trust ourselves to measure our own success, relying on those around us to tell us if we’re doing it “right,” if we’ve done an acceptable amount of work, that we’re working hard enough.

And that voice, that self that would counsel us, grows quieter as we muffle it further with step counts, progress reports, and how many miles we’ve put on that car in the driveway. When all it wants to do is tell us we’ve gone far enough, we’re good, stop running, because to go farther is just stupid.