The Path is Made by Walking

Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.
How many roads did Saint Augustine follow
before he became Saint Augustine?
-“Don’t Worry” by Mary Oliver

Hello from my long-neglected Substack. It’s been months — almost a year — since I last posted. Perhaps unsurprisingly I overestimated the time and energy I have to keep up with such a thing, despite how much I want to.

But! I’m currently on a three month sabbatical from work, so — at least temporarily —I’m back.

And I’m writing today to share about a trip I just returned from with my daughter Juniper. We spent two weeks in Scotland together, eight days of which we hiked the West Highland Way, Scotland’s most popular long distance hiking trail.

In my next post I’m going to outline our full itinerary and some tips for those of you that want to undertake the walk yourself. I highly recommend it.

But for now I want to try to capture the emotional experience of walking 96 miles alone with my daughter.

In our day-to-day I’m exceedingly aware of how I’ve already given her over to her own life: school, friends, and interests.

I’m okay to play second fiddle to the vastness of who she’s becoming. That’s the whole point, I know, even if sometimes I can’t believe we’re already here.

Still, during our walk in Scotland I couldn’t help but dwell on how much she has grown, in part because she celebrated her 10th birthday on the trail and in part because undertaking it has transported me back to a time — seven years ago — when I pushed her in a stroller across Spain on the Camino de Santiago.

Back then she was on the cusp of her third birthday and I was still drowning in the demands of early motherhood. It was a momentous trip — one I still think of regularly, a story for another day.

What I think of now as we walk through Scotland is how fast those seven years have flown by. What I wouldn’t give to hitch her up on my hip one more time, to bury my nose in the soft chubbiness of her cheeks.

Even as I know someday soon I’ll think, if I could have her just one more day as a girl.

My daughter is growing up, entering her tween years. She’s such a person now. She’s funny, a little nerdy, a bit awkward in her changing body while also fully inhabiting it. Outside of family dynamics, away from our usual distractions, I see her with fresh eyes.

Our walk comes at a turning point in my own life too, as I enter middle age, my youngest child off to kindergarten.

With those baby-rearing years behind me I can picture the years ahead for the first time. I see my life at 50, 60. I imagine a life with my kids grown that may mirror the life my husband and I had before them.

But we are here. Now. This trip is a stolen two weeks of time, in which I get my girl all to myself.

The walking isn’t so difficult, but the distance adds up. The first day we walk 12 easy miles, the next a rocky and punishing 14.

The weather holds — no rain. But our feet ache, our toes blister.

We lay our rain jackets out like blankets and picnic in farmer’s fields. We ogle the sheep — so many sheep! I gently phish for information about my daughter’s life. Every once in a while she throws me a bone.

She astounds me: with her grit, her good humor. She’s never hiked more than five miles at once, yet here she is walking day after day like she was born for it. Not once does she complain.

She doesn’t need me to motivate her, but I can’t help myself, I toss her walking cliches:

“Little by little one travels far,” I tell her.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

“Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking.”

This one is strictly untrue in a literal sense. The path is well-marked and well-worn and we share it with hundreds of others.

But I say it anyway, I can’t help myself, because it’s my deepest hope for her: that she’ll have the guts to make her own path in this world.

In response she sings me silly songs. “I came in with a trekking poleeee,” she wails to the tune of “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus. “And I was moving soo slooow.” We add the lines as needed: “My sore - or- or- feeeet.”

What impresses me the most is her ability to push on. On the hardest days when we have a few miles to go she says, “four more miles, I can do that!”

We all learn it eventually, don’t we? That we’re capable of more than we knew. But what a gift to watch her discover it for herself.

Case in point, my favorite memory: On the fourth day of walking the landscape opened up. Suddenly we could see for great distances across the windswept Scottish mountains, the trail snaking on behind and ahead for miles.

“We came from there?” my daughter asked, pointing behind us to where the path disappeared around the distant slope of a mountain. “We’ve walked all that way?

We have, I said.

She shook her head in awe.

It’s a rare moment, but a transformative one, when you get the chance to look back and see how far you’ve come.