We Make the Path by Walking
“Traveller, the path is your tracks
And nothing more.
Traveller, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
By walking you make a path
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again
Traveller, there is no road
Only wakes in the sea.”
I have always loved these lines written by the early twentieth-century Spanish poet Antonio Machado. A slightly different version of the third line is one I often share with people these days, “We make the path by walking.”
As the pandemic grinds on, losses are piling up for all of us. Staying with the image of a path, we have all experienced a few, or maybe even many paths in our lives that have been changed, blocked, or ended. Weddings, graduations, vacations, reunions have been canceled, are dramatically changed, jobs have been lost, health concerns have increased, and loved ones have died. All of these are paths that have been altered or changed forever by COVID-19. And all of this is happening at a time when our ability to physically connect with our supportive friends and family has greatly diminished.
As we wonder what new paths will emerge during and after this pandemic, I find Machado’s words helpful. Because we have ever experienced anything like this, there are no clearly defined paths forward. We are all feeling our way around in the dark. We will make our new paths by all the day-to-day choices we each make going forward. “We will make the path by walking.”
While many of the choices we make right now are individual and particular to our own lives and circumstances, the pandemic also highlights the importance of the collective decisions being made. The choices that we make as a society directly affect the path that this virus will take in the weeks and months ahead. We have ample evidence of this already, and so it is truly the case that we will determine the path that is ahead by the choices we make.
I am a member of the Sierra Club, and I have often been attracted to invitations I receive from them to join one of their week-long trail repair trips. These trips offer participants free room and board, usually in a National Park, in exchange for volunteering with others for a week to help clear hiking trails that have become blocked with fallen trees due to storms. Some trips even focus on building completely new trails because the old trails are judged not to be salvageable.
As attracted to the trips as I have been, I have not ever committed to join one. However, I feel as though I don’t need to sign up for a Sierra Club trip to get this rebuilding experience. This pandemic is inviting me, and all of us, to sign up for a different kind of trail building work. This work ahead is both individual and communal, and we each have an essential role to play in both rebuilding and building anew our neighborhoods and communities, even though we are not quite sure what this will look like or what it will take.
May the wise words of Antonio Machado console and inspire us when we find ourselves wishing that there was a clear path that we could simply follow at this time. We can, and we will make this path by walking—together, one step at a time.
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