Out-Walk Your Troubles

Yesterday’s blog spoke of a heavy heart as the “heaviest thing in the world.” Today, I want to address that. What can walking do for the weights we carry on the inside—things like loneliness, fear, loss or rejection?

Robert Moor comments on the struggle in his 2016 book, On Trails. He’s writing about his fellow travelers on the Appalachian Trail. “Each of us knew how to walk for weeks through hail and snow and rain,” he said. But the greatest struggle was the inner one (i.e. Burroughs’ “heavy heart”).

How did these long distance hikers deal with that? In Moor’s words, “we learned that the only solution was to out-walk it.”

I don’t think he meant that if you walk far enough on any given day, you can leave your grief behind. What he’s saying is that if emotional pain overwhelms you, for heaven’s sake, don’t stop walking. Keep up the daily journeys. Keep looking for the “highways of the gods.”

I’ll leave it to the therapist or pastor to tell you what to do with your mind. But I can say with some certainty that whether you pray or meditate or work your way through Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief, walking is conducive to each.

And then one day—one day you just might discover you have out-walked your troubles.