A man watching television one night was struck by a scene in which a father, unable to change his daughter’s difficult situation, went out into the wilderness as a form of prayer. The man put down his remote and did not pick it back up. The action on screen was not foreign to him. It was familiar.
The first time he did something similar was in his twenties. He had just met the woman he would later marry. She lived about seven or eight miles away. He could have driven, but he wanted to see her and felt a need to travel on foot. He walked up University Drive, past strip malls and traffic lights, and onto the side of the highway. By the time he reached her door, his legs were tired and his shirt was soaked. He was happy. He had pushed himself to endure on the way there, believing that tenderness often needs to move through the body before it can reach another person.
His parents live about five miles away. He has walked that distance many times. Walking past the corners and yards where he grew up changes his state of being. By the time he arrives, he feels fully present and appreciative of the chance to see them.
Sometimes the person he moves toward is his son, who has worn the number five in sports since he was small. When the man learned that Hall of Fame third baseman Brooks Robinson, a player he admired for his talent and kindness, had also worn that number, he walked several miles to a baseball card store and back. He wanted his son to know his number had been worn by someone worth looking up to, and it felt right to make a journey of it.
Once, carrying stress from work, he hiked fourteen miles to the beach. He did not tell anyone. He kept going until the street ended, the ocean was in front of him, and the tension had fallen off his shoulders. For him, these long walks are a way of transferring something from the inside to the outside. They are a way of saying, with his whole body, that a challenge, a person, or a moment matters enough to be honored.
A few years ago, his daughter was going through a hard time. He and his wife tried everything they could to support her. But he was left with the helpless feeling every parent knows, the feeling of wanting to trade places with a child. He had done everything else he could think of and came up empty. So he laced up his sneakers and headed west.
He moved past bus stops and plazas, past vacant lots where the city starts to thin out, past the point where sidewalks end and the land becomes wilder. It was cold for South Florida, likely in the low forties, but he kept going. He went until the last gas station was behind him and there was nothing ahead but open space. He stopped at the fence marking the beginning of the Everglades. The sawgrass stretched to the horizon, and the sky was endless. Nothing out there knew his name or cared what he was worried about. His feet ached. His lungs had worked hard. He had exhausted himself to get there.
Standing at the edge of that wilderness, he let himself want her to be okay in the most raw, undefended way he could manage. He stood there a long time. Then he turned around and made his way home. When he got back, the temperature had dropped into the thirties. He went to the backyard and got in the pool. The cold hit him like a wall. He stayed in the water and thought about her the whole time. It was a small act and maybe a foolish one. But it felt like the truest thing he could do.
He does not know if any of it helped her, though she is doing better now. He will not pretend the road or the cold water had anything to do with that. But he thinks he understands now what he has been doing out there all these years. When love gets deep enough, it builds up inside and needs to move. Some people talk to friends, some write, and some hold on tight until things get better. He pours himself out in the direction of the ones he loves until he is spent.
He has learned that no matter how much people want to, they cannot always change things for those they hold dear. Accepting that takes time and distance. Walking is how he works through what he cannot resolve so he can be more fully available and grounded for the ones he cares about. The scene on television that night touched him deeply because he had been doing what that man did long before he saw it on a screen. Neither of them had a better option, and neither of them needed one. The man on television went out into the wilderness for his daughter. He walked to the edge of the Everglades for his. People do not always have the answers, but they have the love, and they find ways to keep expressing it anyway.
