One Thousand Steps

This is a writing by Philip Russell, my brother, that is especially meaningful to him at this time.  I hope you enjoy it also.

In the early frames of the film “Hoosiers”, coach Norman Dale (the actor Gene Hackman) is shown driving in a late 40’s Buick over the long, straight, and mostly flat farming two-lanes of central Indiana, searching for a small town that holds his uncertain future.  He sips coffee from a thermos and travels throughout the night and into the next morning towards a small school in a place that is full up with mystery, potential, and the vastness of the open plains.

He is completely alone.  Every junction that he comes to must be navigated, so that his journey may continue, for the roads are foreign, exotic in their profound emptiness.  Upon arriving at the town of his intent, he knows that his journey will begin anew, and that the mystery will deepen.  He plunges in, inviting the unknown, the darkness, the rhythms of the heartland, and in the end is triumphant.

Triumphant, for the space of one breath.

Then, no matter what thousand steps he has taken to achieve his triumph, he must start again.

Every day we begin with one thousand steps towards our desires, our heartbeat.  Those one thousand steps are as the beating wings of the myriad Canadian geese flying overhead, trumpeting their passage,  as they power through their migrations, back and forth over the days and years, never questioning  the great enthusiasm , no matter how dangerous each mile, each step  that is before them.

Through the lens of history, our heroes are men and women who trod roads and trails less traveled, roads and trails full up with uncertainty and shadow, but who did so with great vigor, even in the midst of anguish, pain, and doubt.  In the end they and countless others gave truth to the coinage “There is no free lunch.”, for every day begins with one thousand steps, and ends with one thousand more, with many thousands in between.

Who among us is so smug as to take every small step for granted?

It is a bright day outside, beginning it’s long, slow, ambling slide into the early evening.  The roadway is dappled with shadows from the reaching oaks, pines, chestnuts, and cypress above us, and in the distance we can see the bright reddening sky of the eclipsing night advancing upon us, yet we are brimming with hope.

Hope that we wake upon the following day to one thousand beginning and uncertain steps.

Hope abounding and everlasting, Inshallah.

I often drive upon small country roads barely Texaco road-map visible, riding in an old truck with a bent cam and rattle-trap suspension singing to me that it matches my years, and is as equally disappearing – but no less willing to try again at the beginning of each new dawning day.

Amen