“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, To gain all while you give, To roam the roads of lands remote, To travel is to live.” – Hans Christian Andersen
Good God I’m ready to roam remote lands again. Exploring faraway places in a world that has shaken off the pandemic and opens its arms in welcome. We aren’t there just yet, we know, but every day we get a bit closer. A year into this and I’m chomping at the bit for the quirky randomness of faraway travel.
Such thoughts are low agency conspiracies, for the world is right outside, awaiting our arrival. Crossing borders to lands remote may be just out of reach, but crossing thresholds is still very possible. And so the question isn’t the roaming, the question is the focus. I can row a million meters away (and be a different person when I arrive) right in my house, I can time travel in the chair behind me, and I can fly above the earth on snowshoes just outside the door.
The secret all along? To push through our own borders, wherever we are, is to live. To become by working through. To move. To breathe… to gain all while you give.
“Dare to be wise; begin! He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.” – Horace
When you really think about it, what are we waiting for? The right time? That river keeps on flowing by and never runs out. We run out.
Of time… opportunities lost watching it all run by. So then what of this hour? What shall it launch?
Begin. Do you feel the urgency of time? Do what must be done.
“Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can” – Arthur Ashe
Easy for me to say, right? Who am I to challenge you? Make no mistake, I’m dipping a toe in that water myself. For I have my own chasms to cross. The only way across is by putting action where words are and getting to it.
I like a good challenge. Do you? What can you accomplish, see, or become in ten days? Focus on living rightly in each moment, getting across whatever your river is. From today to March 4th and written about right here on March 5th. Comment on that post if you’ve taken the challenge yourself. What are we waiting for? Hurry! For it’s already slipping away.
History whispered from the woods, calling me to find it. A mere rock this time, set in place to forever mark the border between two agreed-upon places, as settlers tended to do. This one, they say, was set here in 1741, a year after being settled and eight years before Hampstead would be incorporated. The other town, Atkinson, would be incorporated twenty-six years later. That there is a carved A and H on the stone that is a handy indicator that you found it, but neither settlement was known by these names in 1741. Hampstead was known as Timberlane Parish then, and Atkinson at the time was a part of Plaistow, New Hampshire. No, the carving came sometime later. And so did the red paint used to highlight the letters.
Living on a border town between New Hampshire and Massachusetts, I’m fascinated with these border markers. Some are easier to find than others, conveniently standing aside the road they’ve watched grow over their lifetime. But others are more evasive. And town border markers tend to be less fussy still. When the plowed fields return to the woods they always wanted to be the stones become hidden. And that’s where the fun begins for adventurous history geeks like me. This one wasn’t so hidden; it appears on trail maps for the conservation land it resides in. But ask the 15,000 residents of the two towns where it is and maybe 400 might not give you an odd stare back. The rock isn’t exactly a national landmark like the fictional Plymouth Rock.
And yet, this tiny rock in the woods marking the border between two towns was set in the heart of the lands the Abenaki once used to stage raids on Haverhill, Massachusetts only four decades before. It would stand witness to the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, The Civil War and two World Wars, drawing the settlers from the land that surrounds it to fight for survival nearby and across the globe. And of course it would witness the birth of a nation.
So sure, it’s just a rock in the woods, but it’s a rock that has seen a few things in its job marking a random border set in 1741 between two settlements in New Hampshire. And I wondered, brushing the snow off it for a better look, how many of those people have wondered at it in that time as I do now? And for how long will it guard this border before such things don’t matter again? I wonder.
“I felt at that moment that it was my chance to do one thing supremely well.” – Roger Bannister
The extraordinary – mastery – starts with that feeling. That spark of excitement at the possibility that just maybe I can do this. And as they say, all it takes is a spark. True, but once the fire is lit, all it takes is fuel to make it roar. For it is just the beginning. There are more moments to come.
The time before that moment aren’t full of sparks, they’re full of stumbles and awkwardness and frustration. The paying of dues. The long slog. The apprenticeships that turn novices into prospects and prospects into rising stars. All a precursor to that moment when you finally know that this, this is it. And once you realize it, you do whatever you must do to, well, realize it.
“You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.” – Michael Jordan
All of us experience that other it. Those moments when you realize that this is definitely not it. Sometimes that it is our it masked by the long slog to get to it. But usually we know the truth of something before too long down the path. And the truth is that most its aren’t our it. So we try another it. And another. Many never find it at all. Plenty experience maybe this is it. And really, it might just be it, but the climb is long and the friends are calling to go out for a few drinks to celebrate the end whatever isn’t their it, and before pretty soon that maybe isn’t your it either.
The relatively few who do find and fully realize their it may experience the extraordinary. For it, by definition, lies beyond the ordinary. Finding your it requires singular focus on achieving it. Which brings us back to that moment. And what you feel. And what you do with your chance.
What good is livin’ a life you’ve been given If all you do is stand in one place – Lord Huron, Ends of the Earth
If snow transforms the landscape, then a walk in that snowy terrain transforms the winter walker. Add a new path and suddenly you’re seeing the world entirely differently than you had before. Add snowshoes and you’re suddenly set free to break off trail to see new places, explore animal tracks that run off into the woods, and to see what’s on top of a rise you might have walked by at another time of year.
There’s a popular pursuit in hiking called red-lining, in which hikers hike every bit of every trail on a map or guide. A popular red-lining pursuit in New England is hiking the AMC White Mountain Guide. The whole point of red-lining is to explore new paths – to get off the crowded hiking trails and try something new. To do it, and to belong to a small group of hardcore hikers who have also done it. And add a measure of accomplishment and camaraderie in the world of hiking. I don’t see myself hiking every trail in the AMC White Mountain Guide, but I’m fully onboard with hiking new trails and seeing the previously (for me) unseen.
On Valentine’s Day I explored trails previously unseen in a forest I’ve spent a lot of time in. Snowshoeing with friends, we walked a trail largely by ourselves to new places. When you’re on a new trail like that, every step is a discovery, every bend in the trail is a curiosity, and every trail junction is confirmation and validation of what the map was trying to tell you all along. There’s magic in taking that image on a map for a walk and making it real.
The day after a long walk on new trails you start thinking about the trails at those junctions that you didn’t take. You wonder at what you might have missed down that way and begin to realize the allure of red-lining. For how do you want to spend your time in this world? Sticking with the familiar or exploring new places and challenging yourself in new ways? There are other paths that warrant exploration. I’ve seen them out there, if only on a map.
I promised myself a snowshoe walk in the woods for lunch, and dammit if I wasn’t going to honor that promise. There was more snow drifting down, quietly adding to the base layer in fluffy contentment. Day-old snow welcoming the new to the accumulation. We’re in the weather pattern now, folks. Snow-upon-snow: February in New Hampshire.
I’d walked these woods on Sunday, but felt a return was in order. Conservation land, with trails popular with dog walkers and tree whisperers. At lunchtime on a random Tuesday in winter you don’t expect a crowd but you expect somebody. In this case one car running, its driver staring down at a phone screen, oblivious to me strapping on snowshoes and beginning my walk.
The trail is compacted again, a day after six inches of snow and with more in the air, speaking to the popularity of the trail. I help compact it for twenty steps and then move off trail into deeper snow. This is what I came for after all: the highly addictive, calorie-burning bliss of clumping about in deep snow. I followed an old stone wall that spends its lifetime keeping the woods and fields apart, and wonder at the farmers who built it a few hundred years ago, and the generations that mended it until the woods finally wrested back control of the land. Now it’s my turn on the land, and I quietly honor those who came before me; their hard life on display.
I rejoin the trail and the pace picks up, crossing a bridge over a stream I see a stand of old pines and step off trail to walk amongst them. Just me and the snowshoes, walking an endless blanket of white that covers the features of the land. Fallen trees, dormant vines and brambles, rocks and frozen wetland all lay together under Mother’s white blanket. And one soul clumping about above like a kid at recess. For that is how I feel, being out like this on a snowy workday.
I think about the time. How long have I been out here? 45 minutes? An hour? Hard to say, really, and I don’t want to look at the watch or phone to find out. But I know it’s time to head back towards the car. Clumping along, I join a familiar path, newly blazed but strangely not compacted as much as other trails. I help with that task while walking under hemlock trees – old friends who I speak with now and then across the years. They’d like me to linger awhile, I smile and hint I’ll be back another day. And cross a stone wall and step out on another field of white.
The car isn’t all that far away now. I could be in it and back in my home office in minutes. But the snowshoes want to fly some more, and so do I. Not just yet, world. I step off the path and walk back into the deep snow, a wandering soul in a quiet, timeless field. I spot a tall stone wall on a rise across an unbroken plane, set my course, and fly.
“That’s what makes death so hard – unsatisfied curiosity.” – Beryl Markham, West with the Night
Where does restlessness come from? I believe it comes from that unsatisfied curiosity that Markham references above. What will you regret on your deathbed? The restlessness of the unexplored: unsatisfied curiosity. This phrase from such an accomplished woman, such an adventurous spirit, knocked me back two steps. Because I understand myself more in that pile of words. Don’t you?
Unsatisfied curiosity. I see is in friends buying a bigger sailboat to go farther, to go longer, on their next adventure. In friends collecting mountain summits and filling social media with their seasons of wonder. In family and friends building meaningful businesses and careers out of schemes and dreams. And I see it in myself, writing and searching for more, exploring our history and the world around us. Stretching in new directions and pushing at my own limits.
Unsatisfied curiosity drives progress and growth. Restlessness is a form of being uncomfortable with the limitations we find ourselves living with. The world is out there, should we be bold. Should we leap. And why shouldn’t we? Why be timid and afraid of life? There’s work to be done. Places to go and visions to be realized. Enter Henry:
“Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.” – Henry David Thoreau
It seems impossible, really, when you think about the leap from the Wright Brother’s first flight in 1903 (itself extraordinary) to Markham becoming the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 33 years later, to humans landing on the moon 33 years after that. In our brief time together on this planet, aren’t you curious about what you can accomplish? Bold action satisfies curiosity. What you can see? What can be realized?
