Nowhere to Hide
We’ve walked enough miles to know something you won't hear most people say out loud; the road isn’t about miles or sights, it's not even about pushing our limits, it’s about hard conversations and stuff you thought you conquered that somehow keeps catching up to you, often through the company of others.
When you walk across America there’s nowhere to hide. Not from ourselves. Not from each other. Not from the world around us.
Out here, you notice how your mood changes the landscape. How a bad thought can darken a sunny day. How one good laugh can carry you three more miles.
Because it’s not just that we experience the world, we’re constantly creating the world we experience. And it loops like this: Emotions shape our thoughts. Thoughts shape our beliefs. Beliefs shape our emotions. Emotions shape our beliefs. Beliefs shape our thoughts. Thoughts shape our emotions. Round and round…
After enough miles, we started to see it everywhere! Both within, and between us all. How a small fear becomes a story, a story becomes a belief, and the belief becomes a wall.
How easily we’re prone to imagining who we are and who they are before we’ve even shared a meal.
We can see how we inherit opinions we never examined. How we defend them like they’re kin. How our bad day turns into negative judgments. Judgment leads to a bad moment. And how a community can develop a terrible opinion of an otherwise good person after that one bad moment. All from a loop nobody realizes is occurring!
When you strip life down to survival, food, water, and the next patch of shade, it gets harder to hate anybody. People you never realized would have such love in their heart, can end up being some of your #1 supporters or saviors even!
But many people are just tired. Tired of feeling helpless in this massive world. Everybody’s carrying something. Most people are trying or at least believe they are. Few people want to be “bad people.” But some have given up.
The loop is at work in it all. But we can interrupt it!
We can choose better thoughts. More rational beliefs. More compassionate emotions. We can choose each other over the ideas that separate us. Let’s be mindful, and break the cycle for the sake of each other!
