Step by Step: The Power of Perseverance

2,500 years ago, there lived a man in southern Italy named Zeno. He came up with some rather crazy ideas that philosophers still talk about to this day. One of his crazy ideas was that movement (walking from one place to another) is impossible, theoretically.

 

Imagine you are in the middle of a room and want to get to the door. To do so you must walk halfway to the door. And then you must walk halfway from that point to the door, and halfway from there and halfway from there, and so on. So, says Zeno, you will never be able to leave the room. It is theoretically impossible, he reasoned, to get from one place to another because there is an infinite number of half-ways. This is called Zeno’s Paradox of Motion, and you will no doubt run into it in your Intro to Philosophy class in university.

 

We know of course that there is a problem with Zeno’s notion. We know that we will leave this Chapel and walk to Marion Hall and eat our lunch whether it is theoretically possible to do so or not.

 

But there is something in what Zeno says. And when I was recently on a long pilgrim walk in his home country of Italy, I thought about Zeno’s idea that it is impossible to get from point A to point B. I was thinking about it one day when we were standing at the bottom of a long steep hill after already walking for 4 or 5 hours that day, knowing that the only food and lodging to be had were at the top. How was I going to climb this last hill of the day with the 15 pounds on my back on my aching feet? It seemed impossible. Not theoretically, but physically.

 

How many of you have faced a task, a school assignment, a workout, or just a day full of things you had to do, and thought “how am I going to do this?” Some things feel, if not impossible, at least totally overwhelming.

 

I confess that this is a feeling I had more than once on my walking pilgrimage through Tuscany. There were many high hills, and they often came at the end of a long day, and occasionally I felt overwhelmed by the thought of climbing them. And I suppose that is the key. That it was my thoughts that made things difficult, and particularly the thought that somehow what I had to do was get to the top of the hill. But that isn’t what I had to do at all.

 

What did I actually have to do? What do we actually have to do when we have a physical or intellectual or emotional task that overwhelms? We just have to take the first step. We cannot get anywhere all at once. However, no matter what challenges lay before us, all we ever have to do is take the first step. This was one of the big lessons that I relearned on my Italian pilgrimage. Ms. Rev and I ended up walking 250 kilometres, which feels like an impossibly long distance, but it wasn’t impossible at all, it was simply a matter of taking one step after another. There were a lot of steps (over 300,000 by my calculation), but a step is easy, and there were many things along the way that made them easier. But ultimately it was like everything, one step after another.

 

We cannot simply think about what we need to learn and know it, we cannot wish our way through a task or a course or a project. Wherever we are going there is only one way to get there: one step at a time.

 

When my son Theo was about six, he showed some interest in a violin that he saw at school. Mrs. Rev asked him if he would like to take lessons. “Oh,” he said, “I can’t do that, I don’t know how to play the violin.” “But lessons are where you learn how to play,” his mother said. “OK,” he said, “in that case I would like to take lessons.” And he did. He thought he had to be at the end before he began. How often do we experience the same such thoughts?

 

It seems simple, but how often do we hold ourselves back, or feel defeated, because we get caught up worrying about how we are going to get somewhere? Or how we are going to finish a task or a class? How am I going to learn calculus? How am I going to become a decent rugby player? How am I going to get through socials class? We all have our nemesis, the thing that feels impossible.

Your very fine teachers and coaches know this, and what do they do? They teach you… step by step, skill by skill, idea by idea, until it all begins to come together. Is it the doing of the thing, or the thinking about how difficult the thing is that slows us down?

 

Anne Lamont (no relation to the Head of School) wrote a book about this called Bird by Bird. She tells the story of her brother who had to do a class project on birds. One night he said to his father, “I can’t do it! There is too much information. Too many birds.” To which his father replied, “Bird by bird, Buddy. One bird at a time.”

 

We don’t know what we can do until we try, and trying is just another word for taking one step, and taking the first step in any direction, toward any goal is something we can all do.

 

There is nothing wrong with imagining where we are going, thinking about how great we will feel when we get there, reflecting on what a wonderful sense of accomplishment we will have when we finish. But if we become too focussed on the end then we risk missing the whole thing, we risk missing life. What does John Lennon say? Life is what happens while we are making plans.

 

When we concentrate on the next step that we need to take rather than focusing always on the final goal we are more likely to be aware of where we are, we can focus on the present and we are able to experience life as it is happening rather than getting caught up in our thoughts about how things might end up.

 

People ask me why I do these big walks – this is why. One can walk all day thinking, “When will this day be over? When will I get to the end so I can stop walking?” This is how some people do pilgrimage, and it is not fun. It is tedious. It becomes a joy when one stays in the present moment, and appreciates the beauty, the sun, the fresh air and one’s own physical strength.

 

And this is a simple – but for me profound – metaphor for how to do life: taking each step as it comes, enjoying the process, not jumping ahead and missing the moment. Pilgrimage is a good practice for taking everything, all of life, one step at a time.

 

Of course, we can get where we are going these days without effort. We can get on a plane in Victoria, take a nap and be in Paris or Mexico City having no sense of the distance we have travelled. And what a wonderful thing that is. However, these conveniences can lead us to believe that we can have whatever we want, whenever we want it, instantly and without effort. And if this were the case, how would we grow, how would we learn, how would we become the human beings we want to be? And isn’t this, after all, what each of us is here at Shawnigan to do?

 

There are many ways to be a pilgrim. For me to be a pilgrim means experiencing every step, every moment of life and knowing that each step we take with intention, (even though we might not know fully where it will lead), knowing it will lead us to a better life and to a better self.