Tag: Walking Thoughts

The Path That Isn’t on the Map

What do you do when there are no directions, no signs, and no map? If you’re lucky, you go anyway. Some of the best days of my life started with no idea where I was going or how I would get back. You climb a hill that doesn’t tell you its name. You come around a ridge into a valley that stops your breath, and you stand in it not knowing a single thing you’re looking at. The names come later, at home, at a desk, with a map finally open. So does the meaning. I learned that on a day in the Pentland Hills, about twenty miles south of Edinburgh, in the summer of 2022.

It was a transition summer. One life was closing and another was about to begin. My years in academia were ending, and the work I do now in trust and financial services was still a few weeks off, sitting out there like weather I couldn’t see. Being between jobs is a little like trying to jump across a creek. You run and you jump and you pray you jumped far enough to make it to the other side. I knew where I was supposed to land. I just didn’t know if it was the right spot, or whether I should have jumped at all. Which is how I found myself in Edinburgh, a long way from any of it, with a few free days and no agenda.

My wife wanted to walk, and I wanted to walk with her. There are famous walks in Edinburgh, Arthur’s Seat rising right out of the city, and we could have done the sensible thing. Instead, the concierge told us to get in a cab, ride south to a place called the Pentland Hills, and just start walking. We had no idea what to expect, no idea where we were going, and no idea how we would get back. So we got in the cab.

The driver left us at a car park I would only later learn was called Threipmuir Reservoir. We followed the signs to the water, mostly because the signs said it was there and we could see it. These would be the last signs I remember seeing. We walked along the reservoir, and then around it, and eventually we looked up and there was a hill. A big one. There was a path up it, narrow and jagged, the kind that makes you suspect you don’t quite belong on it, but there were runners on it, several of them, moving up and along the slope with that easy purpose that tells you a thing is possible. They were the only sign we had, so we followed where they went and started up.

As we climbed, I found myself waiting for a feeling I already knew. Growing up in the Black Hills, I hiked a lot, though I hiked the way a kid hikes, aiming for the destination and not thinking much about the path. Mount Baldy, Little Devils Tower, Hippie Hole. Most of all, Harney Peak, which we would climb a few times each season. I first knew it as Harney Peak, and it was Harney Peak every time I climbed it. They call it Black Elk Peak now, renamed to honor the Lakota holy man.

When you reached that summit, you knew you were somewhere. You stood at the highest place for miles and looked down as the hills rolled away toward the plains. There was a destination, a summit, and a reward for getting there. So as I worked my way up that rocky Scottish path, some part of me was hoping for another Harney Peak. I expected the same bargain. Do the climbing and eventually the world would open beneath you.

What I got instead was better. The climb was hard, but the good kind of hard, the kind that empties your head while it works your legs. Whatever I had carried into that summer got quieter somewhere on the slope. I would find out later that the hill was called Black Hill, and of all the names it could have had, it was that one. I had spent my childhood among hills that carried the name, and here I was an ocean away, climbing another one without knowing it.

There was no sign announcing Black Hill. I learned the name later, tracing our route on a map, and when I saw it, I sat with it for a while. There was something about discovering that name afterward, at that particular moment in my life, that stayed with me. Some circles you don’t notice you’re walking until you’ve already closed them.

The path wrapped around the southern edge of Black Hill, and then the whole world opened. I came around that edge and looked east toward Scald Law, the highest of these hills, and it took my breath away. I had already fallen for Scotland by then, and for the Pentlands, but this was something else. This was not the Harney Peak feeling, the summit that looks down and flattens the world beneath you. This was almost the opposite.

The valley fell away green and folded and enormous, hill giving way to hill, the light doing what light does in that country, always moving. I had come up looking for a view that looked down on everything, and what I found looked out, and across, and into. I stood there and did not need anything to be different than it was, which, if you think about it, is as close to happiness as most of us ever get.

We came down the south edge into the valley below Scald Law and found another path, and this one didn’t test us. It ran north between the slopes, Black Hill on one side and Scald Law on the other, then Carnethy Hill, then Turnhouse. We passed two more reservoirs, each with a few people fishing, patient at the edge of the water. The air was clean in a way that felt like it was doing something for you. You could hear sheep and birds, and not much else. The climb was behind us now, and this was the long, easy after, the way the good stretches of a life sometimes feel when you’re finally not fighting anything.

Eventually we stumbled onto a rustic pub called the Flotterstone Inn. We had a couple of drinks, and I don’t know that a beer has ever tasted more earned. There was still one small problem. We had spent the day walking farther and farther from where the cab had dropped us, and we still had no idea how we were going to get home. Then, outside the pub, we found a bus sign.

I keep coming back to that small detail. There had been no signs on the walk telling us the names of the hills. Black Hill, Scald Law, Carnethy, Turnhouse. We had walked among all of them blind and would learn their names later. Yet there at the end was a sign telling us exactly when the bus would come. Maybe that’s about as much direction as we usually get. Not an explanation and certainly not a map of everything ahead. Just enough to keep going. A few runners disappearing up a hill, a path under your feet, and eventually a bus at the end to carry you home. The rest you learn later.

When I sat down to write this, I pulled up the official trail map because I wanted to retrace that day and make sure I remembered it correctly. That was when I found one more thing. The path my wife and I walked that day, up and around Black Hill, isn’t really on it. It isn’t one of the routes they tell you to take. We had wandered onto something unmarked, drawn up a hill by a handful of runners and a feeling, and it made all the difference.

The name of this blog is two words of Scottish Gaelic. Sireadh Toileachas. Seek happiness. I didn’t choose the language by accident, although I didn’t understand when I chose it how much of my own seeking would trace back to a country I keep returning to. I found some of it that day on a hill I couldn’t name, on a path that wasn’t on the map, in the summer when everything was about to change.

I knew where the new job was. I knew when it started, and I knew where I was supposed to land. What I couldn’t know was whether I had chosen the right path to get there. Four years later, I still think about that walk, but not because I eventually learned the names of the hills or because I managed to reconstruct our route on a map. Maybe it is precisely the opposite.

The path wasn’t on the map, and we took it anyway. I think there are stretches of life that work much the same way. We go looking for signs that this is the right job, the right move, the right time, the right path, and most of the time we don’t find them. You pick a direction, start walking, and hope there will be enough along the way to keep you moving.

Sometimes there is. Sometimes there are runners ahead of you, a valley on the other side of the hill, a pub when your legs are tired, and a bus when it’s finally time to go home. You don’t know what any of it means while you’re walking through it. The names come later. Sometimes the meaning does, too. And I have come to think that has always been the deal.

Walking Thoughts

A ransomware attack took down Canvas at the end of the semester. A seven year walking streak. A treadmill in a basement. And what all three have in common.

Earlier this week, I walked outside in shorts and a t-shirt for the first time in a long time. Ginger was with me, which has not been a given since January. The temperature was what my kids used to call Goldilocks weather. Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right. It felt like spring, which is one of my favorite seasons, and for a few minutes it felt like something else too. It felt like before.

After my fall, the winter was a lot of treadmill miles. Necessary, functional, and about as inspiring as a dentist waiting room. The streak stayed alive, but the treadmill is not this. It is not the morning air or the way Ginger’s ears go up when she realizes we are actually going outside and not just standing near the door. It is not pavement under your feet or the specific quality of light that only exists in early morning in May. The treadmill is the backup system. This is the real thing. I have been thinking about backup systems a lot lately.

The streak is important to me. It is not worth my life. Those two things can both be true, and learning to hold them together has been its own kind of discipline. Ginger has paid the price for my caution more than anyone, which is not entirely fair to her. But here we were on Tuesday morning. Back outside. Goldilocks weather. Shorts and a t-shirt. The dog happy in the way only dogs can be happy, completely and without reservation.

On one of those treadmill mornings earlier this week, before the shorts and the t-shirt and the Goldilocks weather, I was reading about Canvas on my iPad while walking in place in my basement. Canvas had been hit with a ransomware attack. The system was down. Data had been breached. Somewhere, someone was waiting to get paid.

For those who do not spend their lives around universities, Canvas is the learning management system that runs coursework, gradebooks, assignments, and submission records at a majority of American colleges and universities. Michigan uses it. Minnesota uses it. So do Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Cal Berkeley. The public school district down the street uses it. Everyone uses it. Well, almost everyone. Purdue made a different call. North Carolina State uses Moodle, which used to be the system at my former institution before Canvas became the answer to a question nobody asked out loud.

The ransomware attack was timed with surgical precision. End of semester. Grades due. Students at maximum anxiety. Every hallway conversation and email orbiting the same question. Then suddenly, the whole system was gone. I later learned that the day before the attack, my former institution had recommended a policy requiring faculty to use Canvas or suffer consequences that were not fully specified but were clearly intended to sound unpleasant. One day later, Canvas did not exist. The universe, apparently, was paying attention.

In the days after the attack, I came across social media posts and articles from professors, mostly in the humanities. Most were people I have never met. A few were former colleagues. Many smugly announced that this never happened before Canvas, that the old system worked fine, and that if we simply returned to bluebooks and spiral notebooks we would all be safe from hackers. They were not wrong that ransomware cannot attack a filing cabinet. They were wrong about almost everything else. A bluebook and a spiral notebook are one fire, flood, theft, or dog with poor judgment away from a semester that never existed. The filing cabinet has no redundancy, no recovery, and no mercy. That is not a backup system. That is cognitive dissonance with a manila folder.

My response to all of this has mostly been a Gen X eye roll. We are the generation that typed college papers on typewriters with margin formatters because the alternative was starting over. We are the generation that had that one professor, and you know exactly who I mean, who required footnotes at the bottom of every page instead of endnotes because he had decided that was how civilization worked and your convenience was not his problem. In law school, we saved papers every ten minutes and printed them every half hour. By the end of a writing session there would be a stack of drafts on the desk and no reliable way to know which one was current. That was our backup system. We learned early that the tools were never as reliable as they looked and the system was never your friend. So when administrators started calling Canvas innovation, some of us smiled, nodded, and kept backing things up.

And because Gen X does not brag about this kind of thing, I will simply say that my gradebook most likely would not have been impacted. During my last semester teaching, I was required to use Canvas as my LMS. Every time I entered a grade into Canvas, I exported the file into an Excel spreadsheet saved in two places: my computer and a thumb drive. My syllabus was not contained in Canvas. It was uploaded to Canvas, which is a different thing entirely. Assignments were separate files. Canvas was the display window, not the warehouse. I did this because systems fail. Not sometimes. Eventually. All of them.

I have been walking every day for nearly seven years. Two thousand two hundred and some days, depending on when you are reading this. The streak began on March 1, 2020, and I know that the way I know my own birthday. Every step since then has been counted by a device, transferred to software, uploaded to an app that tells me immediately where I stand and how long the streak has been intact. The streak is simple in its requirements and unforgiving in its execution: a minimum of ten thousand steps, every single day, without exception. Early on, that number mattered more than it does now. I needed to see it. Now I just need to know it.

If the watch dies tomorrow, if the software crashes, if every piece of technology I use to track this disappears overnight, and I have already walked at least ten thousand steps that day, the streak is still intact. The walk happened. The streak exists in the record, yes, but it also exists somewhere the record cannot touch. I know for a fact that I have walked every day since March 1, 2020. No ransomware attack changes that.

The grades and assignments should work the same way. The learning happened. The work happened. The record of it should be protected, backed up, saved in more than one place. But the work itself belongs to something no system can hold and no hacker can touch. Canvas was the display window, not the thing itself.

The treadmill kept the streak alive all winter. It is not the walk. It was never the walk. But it was there when the walk was not possible, which is the only thing a backup system needs to be.

I will walk this morning. I will write down the number. Somewhere, somebody will back up a gradebook before the semester closes. Somebody else will not.