Tag: Walking

The 8.3 Miles We Keep Walking

Someone I was dating in college made me watch a movie I had no interest in seeing. Somewhere in Time. I went along with it the way you go along with things in college, more interested in the company than the film. Then Christopher Reeve fell in love with a photograph, Rachmaninoff started playing, and somewhere in the middle of a story about a man traveling back through decades for a woman he’d never met, I stopped being polite about watching it and started actually watching it.

The hotel looked like something from another century, which it was. I didn’t know its name yet, but I knew I wanted to stand inside it someday.

Not long afterward, I bought some cologne, and four mugs came free with the purchase, each printed with a different historic hotel. I couldn’t tell you the other three today, but I still have the fourth. The print has faded from years of dishwasher cycles and daily use, but it still says Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island.

That mug’s made every move I’ve made since. It went with me through law school, to Pierre, to Canton, to Sioux Falls, and then to another house in Sioux Falls. Almost forty years have passed, and it’s never once been left behind.

Years later, my wife and I were trying to decide where to go on our honeymoon. I suggested Mackinac Island. When I explained why, she told me she’d seen the same movie. Not a similar movie. The same movie, with the same hotel and the same Rachmaninoff. Neither of us knew anyone else who’d watched it, so we booked the trip.

The day we first crossed over was cloudy, late May, with fog low enough to swallow the island whole. Standing on the shore in Mackinaw City, I couldn’t tell which direction to look because there was nothing out there to see yet. Then the ferry pulled away from the dock, and somewhere in the middle of the strait, the fog thinned enough to let the island through.

Fort Mackinac appeared first, high on the bluff. Then came Grand Hotel, long and white and exactly like the movie, except it wasn’t a movie anymore. It was real, and we were finally close enough to walk to it.

We stepped off the ferry into the combined smell of horse manure and fudge, which isn’t something anyone warns you about but is something you never forget. We didn’t know which way to walk. There were signs pointing travelers toward Grand Hotel, but half a mile feels different when you’re new somewhere and don’t quite trust the directions.

We kept walking and waiting for the hotel to appear the way it had from the ferry. It took longer than it should have for a half mile covered on foot at a reasonable pace. Excitement does that. It stretches distance instead of shortening it.

Grand Hotel has a dress code for dinner, including a jacket and tie for men after six, and walking into its dining room for the first time was its own kind of time travel. Some men wore sport coats, while others wore tuxedos. Women arrived in evening gowns, and the entire room had a formality that’s difficult to find anywhere else now. Nobody seemed uncomfortable with it. It felt like the natural way to end a day on an island where nothing else moves very fast either.

My wife loves to dance. After that first year, we signed up for lessons so we could actually do it properly, the foxtrot, the waltz, the jitterbug. She took to all of it. I took to it the way a man takes to something his wife loves more than he does, which is to say I learned the steps and stopped complaining about them. We still dance when we’re there, though not every night anymore. Some nights one of us is simply too tired, and we’ve reached the age where we admit it.

That first trip belonged entirely to discovery. We splurged on a bottle of French wine with dinner one night, the kind of extravagance that felt enormous to two people just starting out. We walked more than either of us had walked in years, enough that my legs ached in a way they never had before, but every mile felt worth the ache. The island made us feel as though we’d discovered something no one else knew about. That feeling remained even with a hundred other honeymooners making the same discovery a few feet away.

The boys came a few years later, and with them came a different kind of walking. The first time we covered the full 8.3 miles around the island, we did it on bicycles. Our older son was ten and pedaling behind us on a bike with no gears. He was working three times as hard as we were to cover the same ground, and somewhere along the shoreline road, he began narrating the injustice of it out loud. I couldn’t tell you whether he was whining or simply providing an accurate report of his circumstances. It was probably a little of both.

The perimeter loop was only part of the walking we did during those family trips. We walked to the Woods, not for the restaurant but for the duck pin bowling alley next door. We walked downtown for fudge and whatever souvenir had become that trip’s obsession. We walked to the fort and actually toured it, including the reenactors, cannon fire, and entire production, which is exactly the sort of thing my wife and I tend to skip when it’s just the two of us. On ambitious days, we walked to British Landing on the far side of the island. It was about as far as small legs could go before turning back made more sense than pushing forward.

The shape of the day depended on the weekend. Memorial Day, when we first visited, had very little scheduled around it. We’d begin with an enormous breakfast in the Grand’s dining room and spend the rest of the day working it off. Lunch was wherever we happened to find ourselves. Then came a nap, because you can’t dance all night without one, followed by dinner, dressed properly, and dancing afterward. Labor Day eventually became our favorite. Mornings belonged to walking, while midday brought a cookout and jazz concert. Then came the nap, dinner, and dancing. It had the same bones as our first Memorial Day trip, only now there was usually a saxophone playing somewhere in the background.

The weather never signed on to any of it. We’ve packed for one season and lived through three, worn sweatshirts in the morning, rain gear by noon, and shorts by late afternoon, sometimes all in the same day. You learn to bring everything and expect to use it.

That kind of day, replayed with small variations, is what comes to mind when people mention books I’ve never actually read. I’ve never read James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ve read enough reviews and commentary to understand the idea, and several people whose judgment I respect consider it one of the greatest books ever written. I don’t know whether I’ll ever actually read it. But if I ever tried to write a book in that style, following people through the ordinary events of a single day, my day would take place on Mackinac Island. It would begin with breakfast in the Grand’s dining room and move through the paths, the fort, the horses, the fudge shops, and whatever lunch presented itself. There would be a nap in the afternoon, dinner after six, and music somewhere in the evening. Nothing extraordinary would have to happen, because on Mackinac Island the day itself would be enough.

Earning that kind of day on foot, though, took years. For a long time, walking the full 8.3 miles in one stretch seemed excessive when a bicycle could cover the same ground in a third of the time. It wasn’t until we were older that walking became the point rather than the obstacle. The perimeter is flat, paved, and wide enough to walk beside each other, but the interior is different. Paths climb toward the cemetery, the fort, Sugarloaf, the natural arch, and the governor’s summer residence. Some narrow into dirt trails just wide enough for one person. Others open into gravel roads where we can walk side by side again. Five minutes from the shoreline, the island becomes a completely different place.

The Woods has changed too. It was once where we took two tired boys to go bowling. Now it’s a quiet place where the two of us walk for dinner. The fort is still there, but we no longer feel compelled to tour it. Downtown still smells like fudge and horses, although we’re less likely to come home with a souvenir. The island has remained much the same, but we’re the ones who have changed. The walking that once seemed like something to endure has become one of the reasons we return.

Our last two trips came after Covid and after Grand Hotel changed hands, sold by the family that had owned it for nearly a century. There have been updates, some we like and some we don’t, but the bones of the place remain the same ones we fell in love with from a ferry deck in the fog. We stopped booking the basic room somewhere along the way. On one trip, we upgraded to a suite so magnificent that it remains one of the nicest rooms either of us has ever stayed in. Another trip put us in the Teddy Roosevelt room, and I’ll leave you to imagine what that involved. No two rooms at Grand Hotel are decorated alike. That may be the whole point of the place. We can walk the same 8.3 miles a dozen times and never have the same day twice, and sleep in a different room on every visit and never run out of ways to see the same hotel again.

The far end of the island is where it gets quiet. Most people never make it out there, and if you time it right, early enough or late enough, you can stand at the north shore and have the whole thing to yourselves. The water stretches north toward Canada, and there’s nothing to hear but the wind and the water against the rocks. We stood there on our last trip, the two of us, not saying much.

I don’t know what my wife thinks about when we stand there. I’ve never asked. I think about the Ojibwe who crossed this water long before there was a hotel or a fort or a fudge shop, the early travelers in canoes making the same crossing we made on a ferry, looking at the same strait we were looking at. Twenty-five years of marriage and I still can’t tell you what’s going through her head at that railing. That’s not a complaint. It might be the reason we keep coming back.

When we first started coming to the island, we were some of the youngest people staying at the hotel. The crowd has always skewed older, and back then we noticed it. We don’t notice it the same way now, because we’ve become it. The clientele never really changed. We did. These days I find myself watching the young couples, the ones on their honeymoons, and hoping a few of them are falling for the place the way we did, so that someday they’ll be the older ones standing at the north shore, wondering where the years went.

In a few weeks, we’ll move into a new home, and the faded Grand Hotel mug will make the move with us, just as it’s made every move since the mid-1980s. It’ll be wrapped in paper, placed in another box, and carried into another kitchen. The hotel on its side is harder to see than it once was, but it’s still there, holding the memory of a movie, a honeymoon, two boys, many trips, and all the miles we’ve walked together.

The Bridge at Henley

A few weeks ago I wrote about a walk to Paddington Station, and then a walk back. The reason for the trip, I said, was to buy train tickets to Henley-on-Thames. That was true, as far as it went. But if you’ve been reading this series, you might have wondered what Henley actually meant. The tickets were the cover. My friend was the reason. She was also, if I’m being completely honest, the reason for the course itself, and every course I tried to build before it, and every course I’ve sketched out since. She just didn’t know that until now.

Henley-on-Thames had no particular connection to Brexit when I chose it. If I’d been purely academic about it, I might have taken the students to Birmingham or Coventry, cities in the West Midlands that recorded some of the highest Leave percentages in the country. That would have been genuinely instructive. The area around Henley, as it turns out, voted roughly 55 percent to Remain. I could have taken them somewhere that felt the full weight of the Brexit argument, somewhere that might have actually changed how they understood it. I didn’t. I picked Henley.

The Brexit connection was there, if you wanted to work hard enough to find it. Theresa May represented nearby Maidenhead, Boris Johnson once held the Henley seat in Parliament, and I once spotted Rishi Sunak at the Leander Club in Henley. But I didn’t know any of that when I chose it. That came later, the kind of justification you construct after the fact to make a personal decision look like a professional one. The real reason was simpler. None of those other places had her in them.

None of that mattered on the morning of the trip. What mattered was twenty students in a hotel lobby near Waterloo, two tickets each, and a train to catch.

We did this three times. Three different courses, three different years, but it always started the same way, in a hotel lobby near Waterloo, me handing out two tickets to each student. One for the way out, one for the way back. I told them every time: lose either one and the train fare comes out of your own pocket. Nobody ever lost one, not in three years, though I watched a few of them pat their jacket pockets all the way down to the tube just to be sure.

I had some unpopular rules on my courses. No jeans, no trainers, no hoodies, no baseball caps. I wanted them to blend in rather than stick out, and I know it frustrated plenty of them at the start. By the time we got there, I think most of them understood why. Henley was a different level. Just short of a black tie affair. It was the one day of the course I put on a jacket and tie myself. In that same lobby, before we headed for the tube, I’d give them the rest of it. Nice dinner tonight. Old friends of mine. Be gracious guests. Don’t be the ugly American. Come with at least one question ready, something real, something that shows you were listening and not just eating. A couple of those questions I planted myself, quietly, with a student I trusted to ask them well. I never told them how nervous I was. The day needed to go right, the tour, the dinner, all of it, but underneath that I was about to see my friend and her family again, and some part of me was always braced for the year that wouldn’t go as smoothly as the last.

From Waterloo we’d take the tube to Paddington, then the train out toward Henley, changing at Twyford for the last short hop in. I’d count heads at every handoff like a man counting cards, watching backpacks and the occasional dress shoe shuffle across the gap between trains. We never lost anyone. Not once.

She was waiting at the station every time. Forty-some years since she’d lived in our house the year of the Jubilee, since she’d been the exchange student who became something closer to family than guest, and there she’d be on the platform at Henley, easy to spot, easy to find. She’d arranged much of the day herself, never once complaining about any of it. I knew it took real work. I’m not sure I ever adequately thanked her.

I’d put my hand on a shoulder or two and start the introductions. My students, my friend. My sister, in the only sense of the word that really matters.

She’d walk us into town herself, City Hall first, almost always. Main Street the whole way, small shops on both sides, the street sometimes set up for market day in a way that reminded me of Lower Marsh back in London. City Hall sat at the far end with its clock tower, red brick, pale stone, and the quiet confidence of a building that knew exactly what it was. The tour was another favor, one phone call from her that meant the world. Most years it was the Mayor waiting for us. One year the Mayor was unavailable, and we got the utility superintendent instead, which turned out to be just as useful, maybe more so, because he could explain how the town actually worked. Inside, the building had dark wood, old portraits, and a hall upstairs that looked as if it had hosted a century of dances, council votes, and arguments about parking. Whoever led the tour would explain what was on the docket that month, and then, almost every year, offer the same gentle punchline: Brexit, the whole reason we were there, wasn’t going to change much of anything in Henley. I watched that land on their faces every time, the small recalibration of a student who had assumed the thing they came to study was the only thing happening.

More often than not, the local paper was waiting for us when we came back down. A reporter wanting a few words from the Americans, what they’d come to study, what they made of the town so far. They ran stories about it in the Henley Standard more than once — the first year and again in the second. I never asked whether she’d contacted the paper. But I have my suspicions. It had her fingerprints on it, the same quiet phone call that got us the tour in the first place, one more thing handled before I even knew it needed handling.

Then I’d turn them loose. A couple of hours to wander, to find shops, to find a pub if they were old enough and bold enough. Most years they ended up down by the water, with the church tower standing watch beside it and the rowing clubs lined up along the river like they’d been waiting two centuries for the next regatta. The students would lean against the balustrade in their dinner clothes, taking pictures of each other with the Thames behind them. I’d see the photos later. Always the same easy grins, always a little wind in someone’s hair, always that river. Before they scattered, I gave them one more instruction: there’d be more guests at dinner, and they needed to be on their best behavior. I never had to say it twice.

That was my window. For a couple of hours, the trip changed shape. Her husband was there, and so was my co-teacher, but it no longer felt like I was leading a course. I don’t remember the specific conversations anymore. What I remember is how welcome we were made to feel, every single time, the same way my own parents had made her feel welcome in our house all those years ago when she was the one far from home. It evens out that way sometimes, across forty years and an ocean, without anyone planning it. It was the one stretch of adult conversation in three weeks otherwise spent keeping twenty-year-olds alive, punctual, dressed, fed, and pointed in the right general direction. I loved being around my students, but three weeks is a long stretch, and we were at different points in our lives wanting different things from the day. Those two hours were the quiet in the middle of all that noise.

For years before Brexit ever entered the picture, I wanted to teach a study abroad course mostly so I could get back to England and see my friend, my sister in every way that matters, under the respectable cover of academic purpose. I spent a long time trying to come up with course ideas that would actually fit a business program at a small liberal arts university. Comparative management. Comparative law. A course tracing Charles Dickens through legal London, courtrooms and debtors’ prisons and all. None of them ever quite found a curriculum to live in.

Then Brexit happened, and the course found me instead. A country legally untangling a forty-year marriage, businesses scrambling to prepare for a divorce nobody had a precedent for. It was real. It was academic. It belonged in a business law classroom, and I could defend every line of it without blinking. The course was genuinely about Brexit. But the reason I’d spent years looking for a course in the first place had nothing to do with the EU at all.

The quiet part of the day always had to give way to the official part again. The students would come back from the river and the shops and whatever pub they’d decided they were mature enough to enter, and I’d become the professor again, counting heads, checking collars, reminding them that dinner was still part of the course even if it came with better wine than anything listed on the syllabus.

Dinner was at Hotel du Vin every year. She recommended it, and for a long time I assumed it was just a place big enough to fit the group. It wasn’t until I dug a little deeper that I learned the building sits on the old Brakspear Brewery grounds, brick and beer and old English usefulness still there underneath the polish. It tied the dinner to Henley as something more than a pretty riverside town: commerce, beer, brick, work, reinvention. The hotel is modern. The bones aren’t. I don’t know for certain, but I can’t help thinking it was intentional all along, one more thing she’d quietly arranged without ever mentioning it.

The room barely fit us, every year, and it was often quite warm, the way old buildings get when you pack too many people into a beautiful room and then pretend candles and wine are a climate-control strategy. My friend and her husband joined us every year, along with anywhere from two to four other local adults she’d brought in to sit with the students. On a good night we had nearly thirty people in a room that was meant for twenty. Stone walls scrubbed pale, low black beams strung with tiny lights, candles down the center of a long white table. Same wine selection, same students cleaned up and trying hard, sitting a little straighter than usual and pretending they ate dinner like that all the time. We all knew most of them would have been just as happy with the McDonald’s at Waterloo Station. The conversation changed every year, because the country kept changing. One thing never did. We always ended up ordering a few more bottles than we’d planned on.

The dinners were never lectures, and they were never debates in the way we think of debates now, with everyone waiting for their turn to reload. People disagreed about whether Brexit was wise or foolish, whether it would be painful or merely inconvenient, whether it was about sovereignty, economics, immigration, nostalgia, or some combination of all of it. But the conversation stayed civil, polite, and entirely British. Nobody shouted. Nobody performed outrage for the room. People listened, answered, disagreed, and then reached for the wine bottle like grown-ups.

The first year, Brexit was still young enough to argue about in the abstract. Henley came near the end of the course, the day after Paris, which had only a loose claim on Brexit beyond the EU connection but the students loved it anyway. I’d recruited most of that group myself, and they were quieter than the ones who came after, more curious than opinionated. The British guests at the table were, on the whole, hopeful. It might not be that bad, someone said. One man put it more honestly than anyone else managed all three years: in my heart I was for Brexit, but in my head I knew it was bad. Nobody at the table disagreed with him out loud.

The second year, Brexit had moved from theory to machinery. We went to Henley early, while the students were still fresh and fully engaged with the material. Parliament was in the thick of it, and I watched a student prop her phone against a water glass during dinner, earbuds in, watching the vote happen in real time an hour away while the table talked around her. The optimism from the first dinner had curdled into something closer to exhaustion, though there was still hope a good exit deal could be found. More wine that year too.

The third year, Brexit was no longer a question. It was a date on the calendar. Henley came toward the end again, but this time as the first stop on a three-leg road trip, Henley, then Paris, then an overnight in Chester, the only year we ever made it there. We were within two weeks of the UK formally leaving. Nobody was hopeful anymore, just tired and practical, working through the logistics of a thing that was already decided. The highlight of that dinner, for me, had nothing to do with Brexit at all. One of the students that year had gone to the same high school I had, the same high school my friend had gone to the year she lived with us. Three of us, decades and an ocean apart, all from the same hallways, sitting at the same table in Henley. A reminder of how closely we’re all tied together in this world. We ordered more wine that night too.

I always knew the train times. I always knew exactly when we needed to leave. As that moment got closer every year, some part of me wanted time to slow down, and every year it refused. There was never enough time. There never is. We’d reluctantly finish the last bottle of wine, say our goodbyes at the door, and walk back through town to the station for the long ride home to London.

Three dinners, three years, three versions of a country trying to decide who it wanted to be. That was the course I put on the syllabus. But the part I remember best was never the vote or the lectures or the long train rides back to London. It was a friend who showed up every time without being asked twice. It was students leaning into the river wind, dressed better than they wanted to be, and then showing up at dinner with more curiosity and grace than I probably gave them credit for ahead of time. They asked better questions than I expected. They listened more carefully than I expected. They treated my friends with the kind of care that made me proud to have brought them there. Henley was not just a place I took them. It was a place they helped me see again.

The Long Way Back from Paddington

The tickets were sorted. Now came the long way home.

Last week I wrote about the walk from Waterloo to Paddington, four miles across London on a free day while my students attempted to set the Guinness record for pub crawling. I had gone to Paddington for train tickets to Henley, but the walk back was never going to be the same walk in reverse. London had changed by then.

By the time I started back, the city was louder, the parks were fuller, and the quiet errand had become something closer to a full day’s walk. I was not trying to make good time. I was trying to notice. I reentered at the Italian Gardens, the formal ornamental garden at the northern tip of the Serpentine where Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens meet. The boundary between the two parks is blurry here, which is part of the charm. Stay west and you are in Kensington Gardens. Go east and you are in Hyde Park.

I usually went west first, toward Kensington Palace. The Albert Memorial comes into view on your left, an elaborate gilded monument with Royal Albert Hall rising behind it across the road. Then I would turn back east along the Serpentine. If instead you head south from the Italian Gardens, the path takes you past the Peter Pan statue, which has been standing there since 1912 and still draws people who stop longer than they expected to. Either way, you end up along the Serpentine, which by then was an afternoon walk, with the park busier, the light different, and my feet beginning to understand London better than my map did.

Keep your eyes up while you walk. Hyde Park has parakeets, bright green ones, darting through the trees. They are not native to England, and nobody knows for certain how they got there. The stories range from Jimi Hendrix releasing a pair on Carnaby Street in the 1960s to escapees from a film set. The truth is unclear. The birds are not. Eventually the park releases you. You come out near the back side of Buckingham Palace, which is where I would duck through rather than past the front.

Walking behind the palace, you find yourself in a neighborhood marked by a surprising number of international flags, the kind that signal embassies and consulates. If you know your flags, this is a good stretch to test yourself.

Eventually the consulates of Belgravia give way to Victoria, where each street seems to have been designed by a different century. Turn a corner and you move from Edwardian to Georgian. Turn another and you are in late Victorian. Turn one more and someone has dropped a modern building in without asking. London has always been like that. It should not work. It does.

The street names alone are worth the detour: Petty France, Buckingham Gate, Queen Anne’s Gate. Tucked among the townhouses are pubs with names that feel like they belong in a novel: The Old Star, The Adam and Eve, The Two Chairmen, The Feathers, The Phoenix. More than once I stopped for a late lunch, an afternoon snack, or a local beer. Nobody was in a hurry. Neither was I. Eventually I settled the bill, stepped back outside, and kept walking. A few blocks later I reached into my jacket to make sure the tickets were still there. They were. A few days from now, those tickets would put my students on a train to Henley, and me a few hours closer to someone I had been looking forward to seeing since before the term began. Then, without much warning, Westminster Abbey appeared above the roofline as if it had simply decided to be there. It stopped me every time. It still does.

I usually worked my way behind Westminster Abbey and then to Victoria Tower Gardens, a small park tucked at the south end of the Parliament building that most visitors never find. The gardens take you naturally down to Lambeth Bridge, which is nothing like Westminster Bridge and better for it.

Earlier in the day I had crossed Westminster Bridge, the green one, the postcard one, the one crowded with selfie sticks and people trying to prove they had been there. Lambeth Bridge is different. It is painted a deep red, supposedly to echo the benches of the House of Lords, just as Westminster Bridge echoes the green benches of the House of Commons. Maybe that is true. Maybe it is just one of those stories London tells because it sounds right. Either way, from the middle of Lambeth Bridge you get Parliament and Westminster Abbey without the crowd. The same landmarks, but from a quieter angle.

Once across, you have a choice. Head toward Lambeth Palace, the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury and reportedly so for 800 years. I never saw him there. Or turn and walk along the Thames toward Westminster Bridge.

I usually took the river. The walk along the Thames after Lambeth Bridge is quiet and thoughtful in a way the outbound journey never is. The city has changed pace by now. Fewer people, a handful of street vendors, but no hustlers, no tour groups, and no one performing for anyone. The river moves beside you, and London lets you alone for a while. You follow the river until Westminster Bridge comes into view, and that is your signal to turn. From there it is a short walk back through the familiar landmarks: past the London Eye, back through Leake Street, up through Lower Marsh, and finally the hotel. By the time you walk through the door, you have covered nine to ten miles of one of the great cities in the world, more if you wandered, and your feet know it.

When I got back to the hotel, I carefully sorted and stored the tickets for the trip to Henley. After nine to ten miles of walking, I was ready to join my students for a pint at a nearby pub. Most of them had a head start. Though I should say, some of them had actually used the day the way I had hoped. A few went to the V&A Museum. Others made the pilgrimage to Abbey Road. There were always a couple who did something Harry Potter related, which I understood completely. Many went to pubs. We compared stories about our day.

I told them I had walked to Paddington to get the tickets to Henley. Then I told them a little about my friend. The woman who had lived with our family during the Silver Jubilee. The one who had made my life immeasurably better. Not the whole story. That would come later. For now, it was enough that Henley was getting closer.

A Walk to Paddington

A professor, a free day in London, and a four-mile walk across one of the great cities in the world. From Lower Marsh to Leake Street, Westminster Bridge to Hyde Park, and finally Paddington. This is walking London the right way.

Every course I taught in London included free days on the weekend. The idea was simple. Let the students explore the city on their own terms. In practice, this meant most of them spent the better part of the day on an unorganized pub crawl, apparently attempting to set the Guinness record. As a professor I found this frustrating. But truth be told, when I was 20, I would have done the same thing.

On one of those free days, I had my own agenda. It was my favorite day of the course, just me and London getting to know each other a little better. The walk to Paddington was, on the surface, a practical errand. I needed to purchase train tickets so the students could visit Henley-on-Thames, a small and beautiful town about an hour outside the city, home of the famous regatta and, more importantly to me, people I deeply care about.

One of them had come into our family years earlier as an exchange student and somehow became something closer to a sister. I am not going to name her here, but she knows exactly who she is. She lived with us for a year during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and what started as a temporary stay became one of those rare relationships that keeps deepening instead of fading. Over the last twenty years, she and her family have become one of the better things in my life. The train tickets were the reason for the walk. She was the reason for the trip.

The walk is about four miles each way, but that number is misleading. Four miles in London is not four miles on a treadmill or four miles around a suburban walking path. It usually took me a couple of hours to get to Paddington and a couple of hours to get back. You do not rush a walk like this because there is too much to see. You stop for photographs. You pause on bridges. You stand in front of buildings longer than you planned. You let a street, a park, or a memorial interrupt you. That was the point.

Waterloo Station was about five minutes from the hotel, and I could have taken the Bakerloo line directly to Paddington and spent the rest of the day in a pub. But where’s the fun in that. If you have a free morning in London and a decent pair of shoes, this is how I would suggest spending it.

Before any long walk you need fuel. The Hampton Inn near Waterloo put out a full buffet breakfast, and I worked my way through it with some purpose. The scrambled eggs were, I’m fairly certain, made from powder, but after a cup of tea nobody was complaining. I passed on the beans. I understand this is a beloved British tradition. I have never understood it and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. The potato rounds, essentially flattened tater tots, were almost as good as a McDonald’s hashbrown, and that is not faint praise. I finished up, got myself sorted, and stepped outside into whatever London had waiting.

I turned right out of the Hampton Inn and headed up toward Lower Marsh, one of those streets guidebooks mention in passing and then move on from. That is a mistake. In the morning it is a market waking up. Stalls are being assembled. Vendors are arranging things. The smell of food is beginning to organize itself. The sights and smells remind you of a local fair or carnival from childhood, except this version has better coffee, better food, and no livestock barns. Lower Marsh feels more local than the better known markets, less performed, the kind of place where people actually shop rather than pose for photographs. When I was there it ran Monday through Saturday. These days it is weekdays only, probably another casualty of Covid. Come back on a Tuesday for lunch. You will not regret it.

From there I found my way to Leake Street, which is easy to miss and worth finding every time. At its most basic, it is a tunnel running underneath the outbound tracks of Waterloo Station. The entrance is unremarkable, which is part of the point. You step in and the city changes register entirely. Leake Street is maybe 300 yards long, and every wall belongs to graffiti. Not the scratched-out signatures of people marking territory, but actual art, full murals, color from floor to ceiling, work that changes regularly because other artists paint over it and start again. It smells like spray paint and old concrete. It sounds like your own footsteps. Walking through it early, before anyone else has found it that morning, is one of the genuinely strange pleasures London keeps tucked away.

Leake Street eventually opens onto York Road, near the London Eye and the Aquarium. From there you weave your way toward the Eye and eventually the Thames. This stretch of the South Bank is busy at almost any hour, but early on a Saturday morning in January you can have it largely to yourself, which makes it ideal for photographs. Westminster Bridge is worth visiting once. After that, unless you enjoy navigating around selfie sticks, wannabe influencers staging endless photo shoots, and the occasional pickpocket, there are better ways across the river.

But stop in the middle on your first time. The bridge is painted green, which is said to echo the green benches of the House of Commons, the chamber nearest the bridge. London loves that kind of detail, the sort of thing you can walk past a dozen times before finally noticing it. Then look upriver toward Parliament, the Elizabeth Tower with Big Ben rising over everything, and the water moving underneath. It is the postcard version of London, and the reason postcards exist.

The far side of the bridge drops you into Westminster, and you should take a moment before you go anywhere. You are standing at the heart of England. Parliament is to your left, Westminster Abbey just beyond it, the UK Supreme Court across the square, Whitehall stretching north. Not all of it packed into one view, but close enough that you can feel the weight of the place. Early on a Saturday morning in January you may have most of it to yourself, which is the only way to properly appreciate it. From here you have choices. Head up Whitehall and cut across the Horse Guards to reach St. James’s Park from the north, or head due west and arrive at the southeast corner of the park directly. Either way works. I usually went west. And that is where Churchill finds you.

Tucked at the southeast corner of St. James’s Park, nearly in the shadow of Parliament and Downing Street, are the Churchill War Rooms. If you have any interest in World War II, this is not optional. The War Rooms are the secret underground bunker where Churchill and his senior commanders spent the war years monitoring, planning, and trying to hold a country together when certainty was in short supply. When the war ended in 1945, they sealed the facility and walked away. It exists today almost exactly as it was left. The maps are still on the walls. The phones are still on the desks.

A city like London never lets you walk only in the present, and on June 6 that was especially true. Eighty-one years ago, the largest seaborne invasion in human history launched from Britain and landed on the beaches of Normandy. Some of it was planned in rooms like the ones a few hundred yards from where you are standing. The men who went ashore that morning did not all come home. A morning walk through a peaceful city is not a small thing when you remember what left from these shores. It is worth a moment of your time to remember that.

St. James’s Park is worth walking through, not around. Follow the path along the lake and take your time with it. The waterfowl alone are worth slowing down for. Ducks, geese, and swans move around in numbers that suggest they know they own the place. Henry VIII used it as a deer park. James I turned it into an exotic animal park. Charles I walked through it on his way to his execution. Now it is nearly sixty acres of paths, water, birds, and one of the better views in London. From there, Green Park carries you toward Hyde Park.

Hyde Park deserves its own moment. St. James’s Park belongs emotionally to monarchy and ceremony. Green Park belongs to quiet passage. Hyde Park belongs to the public, which means it is sometimes beautiful, sometimes noisy, sometimes odd, and almost always alive. By the time you arrive you have already walked a couple of miles, Paddington is just on the other side, and you might be tempted to think the hard part is behind you. It is not. Hyde Park covers 350 acres. Walking across it is a little like driving through Montana on I-90, where you are absolutely certain it is never going to end.

Henry VIII took this land from the monks of Westminster Abbey in 1536. The man had a pattern. It stayed private for a century until Charles I opened it to the public in 1637, giving Londoners a place to promenade, argue, protest, and occasionally listen to each other. History remembered him poorly regardless.

Every November through January, a corner of Hyde Park transforms into Winter Wonderland, a sprawling Christmas festival with roller coasters, a Ferris wheel, ice skating, a Bavarian village, and enough mulled wine to get through a British winter. I always wanted to go in but never had anyone to go with, and frankly the admission price gave me a convenient excuse. So I walked around it. London’s giant civic backyard. It takes a while to cross. I never minded.

And then, sometime around noon, after nearly four miles, three parks, and more pauses than I could count, I arrived at Paddington. For many, Paddington is where London begins. If you fly in from Heathrow you take the Express straight here. There is a bear named after this place, which tells you something about how deeply it has worked its way into the culture. It is a vast station of steel and glass, with none of the grandeur of Union Station in Washington or Grand Central in New York. It is open and cold and relentlessly busy. Frankly, it is overwhelming.

But I had a job to do, and I did it. Tucked into one corner was the ticket office. Because it was Saturday, there was rarely a line. I ordered the tickets with the group discount and tucked them into my jacket. I always found it odd how satisfying that moment was. I had walked nearly four miles across London for a stack of paper tickets, which made no sense and perfect sense at the same time. They were not just tickets. They were one step closer to Henley, one step closer to my students meeting family, and one step closer to seeing one of my best friends.

The tickets were sorted. Now came the long way home

Advice I wish I had Given My Younger Self

The question is not really whether you would go back. The question is what you are going to do today with everything you already know.

Lately, scrolling through the noise that social media has become, I keep running into a certain kind of post. You have seen them. They usually start with a photograph, a high school hallway, a gymnasium, a parking lot that looks like every parking lot from 1984. And then comes the question. Would you go back? To a specific year. To a specific moment. To a specific version of yourself you have not been in a very long time.

The comment sections on these things are something. People arguing with complete strangers about which year they would choose and why. Some of them are serious. Some of them are heartbreaking. All of them are trying to answer the same question underneath the question, which is: was there a version of this life that went better?

I think about that question more than I probably should. When I see those posts I think about the 1980s with genuine nostalgia. It was a simpler time. We were not being bombarded around the clock with news and noise and everyone’s opinion about everything. But nostalgia is not the same as regret, and when I am honest with myself I do not look back at what I had and feel like something is missing now. My life is good. Arguably great. My wife is my best friend. My sons turned out amazing. My work has mattered, for the most part. My friendships have lasted longer than most things I own. And Ginger meets me at the door every single day like I have been gone for six months.

So the long and short of it is I am not going back. But I would send a note. That note, it turns out, has existed for years in rougher form, tucked inside syllabi and first-day-of-class remarks and the things I said on the last day when I thought nobody was writing anything down. It was shaped by the mistakes I thought I had made and the opportunities I thought I had missed and the things I wished someone had told me before I had to figure them out the hard way. Since I do not have a DeLorean with a flux capacitor, I will have to settle for what I have written here.

Find time for the people who will be gone the soonest. Now, if we are being honest, I would absolutely go back knowing what I know. I understand I might be tinkering with the space-time continuum, and I have made my peace with that. Yes, I would probably look into a few investments. Apple. Walmart. Amazon. Netflix. I am not a saint. But that is not actually why I would go back. I would go back to sit with my parents for a while. Hug them more. Ask them questions I never thought to ask. Ask them about their parents and grandparents, their cousins, the family stories that were actually told. Because they were told. I just was not paying attention the way I should have been. Storytelling is how families survive themselves, and I let too many stories go in one ear and out the other because I was young and thought there was plenty of time. The same goes for a few friends and family members I did not know I was running out of time with. In 1986, I did not know there were only ten years left with my dad.

Pay attention. Most of life does not announce itself as important when it happens. The random Tuesday night dinner when everyone somehow made it to the table. The walk with the dog. The conversation with your dad the night before he died, not knowing it would be your last. The family story you have heard a dozen times before and assume you will hear a dozen more. The big moments are easy to spot. Graduations. Weddings. Births. Retirements. Life has a way of putting those on the calendar for you. The smaller ones require more effort. They slip by quietly, and only later do you realize they were part of something larger. Take the picture. Ask the question. Stay a little longer. One day you will discover that what looked like an ordinary day was actually a gift. The trick is noticing it before it is gone. Turns out Ferris Bueller was right. Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Take the trip. Both of them. The one you cannot afford and the one you can. You will find reasons to wait on both, and the reasons will sound responsible and they will be wrong. Think about what you actually remember. Not the gifts. Not the things. The trips. The British Isles with my parents and grandparents. Switzerland for a dear friend’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The thirteen-hour drive to Mackinac Island with my family, and somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin one of my sons looking up and announcing, “You people are the worst family ever. You people are not my family.” I remember all of it. If I had it to do over, I would rethink every holiday, every birthday, every Christmas morning. Less stuff under the tree. More stamps in the passport. Experiences last forever. Most everything else ends up at Goodwill.

Travel does something else too. It exposes you to different cultures, different people, different food, different ways of looking at the same world you thought you already understood. It hardens some of your beliefs and softens others, and both of those things are good for you. French wine tastes better in France. And most of all, you learn that a mother in South Dakota loves her child just as much as a mother nearly everywhere else in the world.

Ask her out. In my wildest dreams I did not think she would say yes. She said yes. We are married. There were others along the way, there always are, but she was the one, and I almost talked myself out of asking because I was certain I already knew the answer. I did not know the answer. That is the part nobody tells you. You are a terrible predictor of outcomes involving your own life. Ask anyway. Apply anyway. Start the business anyway. Have the conversation anyway. The worst outcome is rarely as bad as you imagine, and the wondering lasts considerably longer.

Read more than you think you need to. Not for school. Not to finish. Read because, like travel, it opens your mind and calms it at the same time. It expands curiosity and makes you better in ways that are hard to measure and impossible to fake. Every good book teaches you something. Find an author you enjoy and spend time with them. Doris Kearns Goodwin taught me about leadership through Lincoln and Team of Rivals, perhaps the greatest lesson in leadership ever put on paper. Oddly enough, my favorite book of hers is not about Lincoln at all. It is about growing up as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan in the 1950s. David McCullough took me to Paris in The Greater Journey. Michael Lewis taught me to see the world differently. Mitch Albom reminded me that kindness still matters. John Grisham kept me up far too late reading The Firm.

Books are inexpensive travel. They let you borrow someone else’s life for a few hundred pages and return to your own a little wiser than when you left. Ted Lasso once quoted Walt Whitman on this subject: be curious, not judgmental. There is essentially no evidence Whitman ever said that. But the line made me curious enough to go read some actual Whitman, which I suppose proves the point entirely. I have learned something from almost every book I have read. Some lessons were profound. Some were useful. Some were simply that Clan of the Cave Bear is still not making my top ten.

I baked reading into my syllabus every semester, mostly through Wall Street Journal articles, but it was intentional. I wanted my students curious about the world beyond the classroom and beyond the case law. Whether it worked I cannot say with any certainty. Some of them listened. I choose to believe more of them did than I will ever know.

Start saving. Now. Not instead of living, not instead of the trip or the experience or the night out that becomes a story you will tell for thirty years. Alongside all of it. Compound interest is the closest thing normal people get to magic. The problem is that magic only works if you start early. Start by at least matching what your company puts in. Then think about more. Ten percent of your pay is a good number. You will not miss it, and I say that knowing you think you will. Every time you get a raise, increase your savings rate by half. If you get a four percent raise, save two more percent before you ever see it. The math on compound interest is not complicated, but it is unforgiving. Time is the one ingredient you cannot buy back. You do not need to save everything. You need to start. There is a difference, and younger me confused the two for longer than I would like to admit.

Move your body. I want to be clear about something. I have never liked working out. The gym, the weights, the person grunting next to you at six in the morning, none of that was ever me. But I do like moving, and it turns out that is enough. Walk. Swim. Bike. Dance. Tai chi. Golf without the cart. Run, if you are that particular kind of crazy. It does not have to hurt and it does not have to be impressive. It just has to happen, and it has to happen again tomorrow. I have now walked more than thirty million steps, one day at a time, and I did not do it because I love exercise. I did it because I love moving. The body keeps score longer than we think it does, and small, consistent habits compound the same way investments do. Small. Consistent. Long term. The math works the same way in both places. Trust it.

Worry less. I mean this practically, not as a bumper sticker. You are lying awake at 2am about the student upset about his grade, the client upset about his case, the beneficiary upset about not getting enough money. You cannot fix any of it at 2am. And if you are being honest, most of it was never yours to fix in the first place. I used to tell my students there were three kinds of problems in the world. Your problems. My problems. Our problems. And most of the problems keeping people awake at night belong firmly in that first category. Not mine. Not ours. Yours. The sooner you learn to hand them back, the better everyone sleeps, including you. So plan for what is actually yours. Adapt when you need to. Handle what is genuinely in front of you. But the 2am rehearsal of every possible outcome, that is just energy leaving the building with nothing to show for it. I stumbled onto a meditation technique once where you imagine a river and you place each anxious thought onto a boat and watch it float away. You keep going until the river is empty. The first time I tried it I was skeptical. By the fifth boat I was nearly asleep. Five minutes of watching your thoughts drift downstream will do more for you than two hours of staring at the ceiling. Put it on a boat. Let it go.

Take the chance. This one is broader than the trip and the girl, though it includes both. I mean the job you are not sure you are qualified for. The idea you have not said out loud yet. The conversation you keep rehearsing and never having. The version of yourself you have not introduced to anyone yet. Younger me was careful in ways that younger me thought were wise. They were not wise. They were fear with better posture. I tried to tell my students that, in so many words, every chance I got. I am not sure they believed me. I am not sure I would have believed me either. And if it does not work? Pay attention. Failure usually has something to teach you. More often than not, the breakthrough is sitting just on the other side of the thing that did not go according to plan. Some of the best things that happened to me came immediately after something I thought was a setback. At the time I could not see it. Looking back, it seems obvious. Looking forward, it never does.

Forgive yourself. You will make mistakes. You will say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong moment. You will lose friends, money, and maybe a job. Some of it will be your fault. Some of it will feel like your fault and will not be. Either way, carrying it does not fix it. Learn what it has to teach you, resolve not to do the same thing twice, and put it down. It just makes everything else heavier.

There is a particular cruelty in advice. It arrives, almost without exception, after the moment it would have been useful. Four years ago I wrote something called The Last Lecture, my final words to my students at Augustana on my last day in the classroom. Reading it now alongside this is an interesting exercise. The curiosity is still there. The belief in showing up is still there. But that piece was written from the front of a room to people just starting out. This one is written from inside a life, to myself, with the benefit of forty years of evidence. What strikes me most is that the advice is not all that different. Which means one of two things. Either I have not learned as much as I thought, or the fundamentals were right all along and the only thing that changes is how personally you feel them. I choose to believe it is the latter. And I suspect that everything I just told younger me applies just as much to the students who sat in my classroom over the years as it does to the man who stood at the front of it.

Here is the thing I did not expect when I started writing this. Most of this list is not finished business. It is current business. The people who are still here will not always be. There are trips not yet taken and chances not yet seized and worry that still needs to stop. The body still needs to move tomorrow and the day after that. The math on all of it still works, but only if you start. I wrote this as advice to a younger version of myself and somewhere in the middle of writing it I realized I was also writing it to right now. That is what the social media posts never tell you. The question is not really whether you would go back. The question is what you are going to do today with everything you already know.

Most of the chances I took turned out better than I deserved, and most of the ones I did not take I cannot quite stop thinking about. The balance sheet is not even close. My life is good. It could have been good sooner, and with less hesitation. But it is not too late for any of it. Not for me. Not for you.

Do the thing. Take the trip. Ask.

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.

The next 30 million steps

Six years of walking at least 10,000 steps a day taught me a lot about perseverance. A fall in my driveway taught me even more about perspective.

In 1989, the first Life Alert commercial hit television. A woman on the floor yelling into a necklace: “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

To a twenty-something watching it at the time, the whole scenario seemed absurd. That was a problem for Old People, somewhere far down the road, probably around the same time you start voluntarily eating bran for breakfast.

Life, of course, has a way of adjusting your perspective.

Given my recent fall in the driveway, that famous line suddenly felt less like a punchline and more like a documentary. Gravity made a convincing argument, and the driveway won the debate.

In last week’s blog post, I joked that only five people read the essay and two of them probably clicked the link by accident. At least I think I was joking. The analytics suggest I may not have been. But those five readers were clearly paying attention. Within hours I received several helpful suggestions, including one enthusiastic recommendation that I start “walking by five in the morning,” which I assume is now considered medical advice.

Last week also marked six years of walking at least 10,000 steps a day. Other than writing about it here, the milestone passed with almost no fanfare, which frankly felt appropriate. Nearly 30 million steps sounds impressive until you realize most of those miles were not heroic. They were cold mornings, windy afternoons, and sidewalks that could politely be described as uninspiring. Plenty of days the couch made a very strong closing argument. People assume a streak like that is about discipline or health, and those things matter. My knees appreciate it. My doctor probably does too. But after six years, I’ve realized the real benefit isn’t physical. Mostly, it’s perspective.

And perspective has a funny way of making you look at familiar things differently.

This week the streak continued, but I changed a few things up. Same commitment, just a slightly different angle.

One morning I walked a familiar route in the opposite direction, clockwise instead of counterclockwise. Another day the treadmill got involved, and I started playing with the incline and speed like a bored airline pilot. One morning I swapped the usual podcast for music.

Small adjustments, same routine. And something interesting happened. By making those subtle changes, I started noticing things in my own neighborhood that I hadn’t seen before. An electric utility box that had always been hidden from one direction but stood out clearly from the other. A tree I don’t remember ever seeing, even though it must have been there the entire time. I noticed the sunlight hitting houses, water, and the sidewalk differently depending on the angle. Turns out sometimes the only thing that changes is the direction you’re looking from.

It reminded me of something I once heard from pro golfer Dicky Pride. When Pride prepares for tournaments, he sometimes walks the course backward during practice rounds. Not playing it that way, obviously, just studying it.

His explanation stuck with me. Golf course designers are good at their jobs. They know exactly where players look and where the traps appear when you approach a hole the way it was designed to be played. From the tee forward, the course tells you a story.

Walk it backward and suddenly you see something else. You see where the trouble really sits, and you notice angles you missed. The fairway that looked generous from the tee suddenly looks a lot narrower when you’re standing on the green looking back. The bunkers make more sense, and the danger becomes clearer.

Same course, different perspective.

Six years ago I started walking because I wanted to feel better. What I didn’t realize was that the real value wouldn’t be the miles behind me. It would be the perspective that comes from continuing to put one foot in front of the other. The real story was never the first 30 million steps. It’s the next 30 million.

The weather is finally starting to warm up, which means Ginger is thrilled the streak continues. She has always been a strong advocate for additional walking. So tomorrow morning we’ll head out again, same sidewalks and same neighborhood, maybe clockwise, maybe counterclockwise. Sometimes the best way to see things differently is simply to keep walking — just from another direction, toward the next 30 million steps.

Six Years. Nearly 30 Million Steps. My Dog Is Thrilled.

The streak has become a daily permission slip to call the day a success. Some days it is a gift, a good conversation, an unexpected view, twenty quiet minutes nobody can touch. Other days it is just a man and his kitchen. Either way, you keep moving, and that is the philosophy.

Fair warning. If you have followed this blog for any length of time, you know what is coming. I have written about this before. My five loyal readers are nodding. The other two are still trying to find the exit. Feel free to skim. I mostly write these for myself anyway. It is cheaper than therapy and the co pay is better. Still, stay with me. Maybe something here lands for you too.

January was brutal, and I wrote about it. Somehow it became the most viewed post in the five year history of this blog. Apparently the best thing I ever did for readership was fall down. February was merely hard, and through all of it there was the streak. Today it turns six years old.

That means two thousand one hundred ninety one consecutive days. Not one missed. No exceptions. At least 10,000 steps every single day.

Nearly 30 million steps. Over 13,000 miles. An average of 13,500 steps a day. Thirteen thousand miles, on foot, mostly on ordinary days.

The last two months tested the streak more than most. I am still hurting from the fall in January, and my neck and back remind me every morning that gravity won. Some days I stand up slowly and negotiate with muscles that are not interested in compromise. There were days, more than I would like to admit, when I considered letting it go because six years felt like a respectable number. Instead, I pressed on.

Here is what that actually looks like sometimes. It is 8:57 p.m. I am tired. The weather is ugly. My neck and back are staging a formal protest. And there I am, walking circles around the main floor of my house, because every loop is 75 steps and I still need 1,256.

It is not scenic. It is not Instagram worthy. It is a middle aged man shuffling past his own kitchen for the fourteenth time while his dog watches with concerned confusion. But the steps get done and the streak survives, and somewhere in that absurd little ritual is the whole point. Some days, showing up looks nothing like you imagined, and it counts anyway.

The streak has become a daily permission slip to call the day a success. Some days it is a gift, a good conversation, an unexpected view, twenty quiet minutes nobody can touch. Other days it is just a man and his kitchen. Either way, you keep moving, and that is the philosophy.

Six years of daily movement has not made me stronger. It has made me steadier and less dramatic about hard days. I am more willing now to do the small, boring thing that keeps everything else from unraveling. The change was not heroic or loud. It was ordinary, and it stuck.

Today feels like spring’s opening act. The snow has mostly surrendered. I spotted a robin doing that smug little robin thing like it never left, and the days are stretching longer. Year seven will not be about intensity. It will be about curiosity. I want new trails, new neighborhoods, and roads I have never turned down before, because discipline got me here and curiosity can take it from here.

That is where you come in. Yes, you, all five of you plus the two still searching for the exit. If you have a favorite two or three mile route, send it my way and consider it your contribution to year seven. I cannot promise I will get to all of them, but I can promise I will keep moving.

Six years ago this started as a way to survive a pandemic. Now it is the anchor in chaotic mornings and the release valve at the end of hard days. It is quiet proof that I showed up for myself again, even when showing up meant walking past my own kitchen for the fourteenth time.

If I am honest, though, I am not the one who benefits most. Spring means real walks again, trails and air that does not sting. It means doors that open on purpose and paws that hit pavement with enthusiasm. Discipline is easier when someone is waiting by the door.

She has watched the kitchen laps and endured the treadmill indignity. She has waited on cold mornings with complete certainty that today would be worth it. She was right, because six years and nearly 30 million steps later, it was never really about mileage. In the end, it was always about the dog.

2026 arrived quickly and with a certain enthusiasm for chaos.

Some seasons arrive quickly, carrying more than we planned to unpack.

It was probably best that I didn’t subscribe to Dry January. I should have known the year was going to be a beast when, less than six hours into it, I was in a hotel and the fire alarm went off—and it wasn’t a drill. This is not how you want to meet a new calendar year. Then the gods of fate said hold my beer when four members of my immediate family experienced “medical” events, including three emergency room visits, three hospitalizations, and a surgery. January came in like it had a clipboard and a very aggressive agenda.

Along the way, I learned—or was reintroduced to—phrases like spinal stenosis, Clostridioides difficile, colitis, concussion, and tympanostomy. My medical vocabulary has expanded more in a few weeks than it had since I snuck into my dad’s home office and leafed through his copies of the Journal of the American Medical Association and Annals of Surgery. I may not have earned a degree, but I’ve at least qualified for a certificate. Possibly laminated.

And in case you hadn’t noticed—perhaps because you, too, were distracted by sirens and discharge papers—there is also a lot going on in the world.

Much of my attention has been on the Twin Cities. My family has been impacted. My friends have been impacted. This hits close to home. I watch and wonder how we got here. Early in my professional life, I spent time both prosecuting and defending criminal cases, which means I have a reasonably high tolerance for human dysfunction. Even so, many of the things I now see and read—especially through that lens—are genuinely shocking. Not shocking in a cinematic way. Shocking in a quiet, procedural, this-is-how-it’s-written-down way.

Current events often pull me back to what I studied in college, back when you could take courses that wrestled directly with uncomfortable truths instead of politely circling them. I took more than one class focused on the Holocaust and similar atrocities. As a senior, I enrolled in Light in the Darkness: Courage and Evil in the Twentieth Century. The course focused heavily on the Holocaust. At the time—and still—I struggled with how something so terrible could happen.

We studied life in Nazi Germany. We discussed Anne Frank. We read Elie Wiesel. We also read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, a book I still don’t fully understand, which puts me in excellent company that includes most honest readers.

Though my memory of the course is imperfect—college being a long time ago and optimism being a powerful anesthetic—several moments stand out. Perhaps most significantly, we took a “field trip” to Minneapolis. While there, we attended a concert at Orchestra Hall, spent an evening at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre, and visited a Holocaust museum.

But there is one experience I will never forget.

We met Holocaust survivors.

One woman had been sent to Auschwitz. She told us her story patiently and answered our questions with care. Then, in a moment that permanently fixed itself in my memory, she rolled up her sleeve and showed us the tattooed number on her arm—a mark that had been there for more than forty-five years. No build-up. No warning. Just history, sitting across from us in a folding chair.

She spoke about the days leading up to liberation. She described the moment she knew she was free. She was offered a ride to the nearest supply camp roughly a mile away. She declined. This, she said, was her freedom walk. She walked the entire distance, stopping frequently because she was so weak. She had to keep her head lower than her heart to avoid losing consciousness.

She spoke about her first bite of food—and the danger of eating too much, too quickly—because her body had essentially shut down. She knew she was close to death, close enough to feel it in a practical, unsentimental way, but she willed herself to live. She told us she kept repeating to herself: Not today. Today I am free.

Someone asked her how she felt about Germany now. Very calmly, she explained that she bore no ill will toward Germans born after World War II. They were not responsible, she said; they carried the scar, not the guilt. But Germans who were present at the time—who did nothing and said nothing—were responsible for the atrocities.

There was no theatrics. No slogans. No grand conclusions. But the emotion, the pain, and the anger hung in the air, doing what facts sometimes do when delivered by someone who earned them the hard way.

I don’t remember her name. I remember her message.

Make sure this never happens again.

Since then, I have found myself returning to her words. I wonder—perhaps naively—whether a similar regime could ever arise in my own country. I keep reaching the same conclusion: yes, it absolutely could. Not because of any single current event, but because we are human, and humans have repeatedly shown a remarkable capacity for atrocity, especially when paperwork is involved.

I also arrive at a more uncomfortable conclusion: there is no way to know how I would respond.

Would I recognize what was happening in real time? Would I speak out? Would I protect those being targeted? Or would I choose personal or family safety over principles and values? Would I convince myself that compliance was temporary, reasonable, or necessary? History suggests these decisions are rarely dramatic. They are incremental. Transactional. Rationalized. Often explained afterward with excellent grammar.

And that, more than anything, troubles me.

What unsettles me most is not that the news feels alarming—news often does—but how quickly alarming things begin to feel normal. A headline that stops you cold on Monday becomes background noise by Friday. By the following week, it’s something we summarize with a shrug and a sentence that starts with, “Well, I guess that’s just how things are now.” That is usually the point at which questions about how we would respond quietly turn into questions about what we are willing to tolerate.

What we are willing to tolerate is shaped, in no small part, by what we understand to be our rights in the first place. When those boundaries are clear, normalization has limits. When they are vague, everything becomes negotiable. Fortunately, we do not have to define those boundaries from scratch or rely solely on instinct and outrage. We have a well-worn roadmap. It is called the Constitution. It does not prevent abuse or guarantee wisdom, but it does establish a baseline—certain rights meant to exist regardless of convenience, popularity, or who happens to be in power.

At its most basic level, that baseline includes the right to move through daily life without harassment; the right not to be stopped and required to justify one’s existence; the right to be free from restraint, harm, or worse based on minor suspicion; and the right to observe authority without becoming its target. It includes the right not to be threatened, exploited, confined, or erased—and the right to speak freely, worship freely, and to have a home that remains a refuge rather than a checkpoint.

None of this is abstract. None of it lives safely in textbooks or court opinions. It unfolds in real time—often within hours: a traffic stop at dusk, a crowd forming, a knock before sunrise, a decision made quickly by someone with power and limited restraint. At that speed, there is no meaningful pause, no appeal, no rewind. Due process—the idea that power must justify itself before it harms—only protects people if it exists before force is applied, not afterward. If this feels distant or exaggerated, it is usually because it has not yet arrived at one’s own door.

These are not rights granted by government, nor privileges extended for good behavior. They exist prior to government—whether understood as gifts of God, products of nature, or the result of generations of hard-won human progress. We entrust them to the state for one narrow purpose: protection. When that order is reversed, what remains may look like order, but it is not law.

It is force, borrowing the language of authority.

I began by describing how difficult January felt for me—personally, professionally, and emotionally. But those struggles, real as they were, pale in comparison to January of 1945, when Auschwitz was liberated and survival itself depended on the refusal to give in, even when the body was failing and the future uncertain. Remembering that contrast doesn’t diminish present concerns; it sharpens them. It reminds me that perspective matters, that endurance has a history, and that resolve—then as now—often begins with a single, quiet decision: not today.

Cold Hard Facts

There is a strong argument for keeping certain things to yourself. This is probably one of those things. Unfortunately, I may soon be in public wearing medical equipment, which tends to raise questions and invite speculation. Rather than let the driveway control the narrative, or pretend it didn’t know exactly what it was doing, here is what happened.

Friday morning, as I was leaving my house to walk the dog, I was attacked. Not by an animal. Not by another human. By ice. In my own driveway. A place I had crossed hundreds of times safely. No warning. No sound. No dramatic buildup. The last clear thought I remember having was wondering whether the driveway might be slippery. That thought turned out to be the prologue. When I regained consciousness—flat on my back, staring at the sky, with a dog hovering over me like a very judgmental witness—I felt comfortable ruling the surface hostile.

Out of an abundance of caution, and at my wife’s direct and non-negotiable order, I went to the local hospital. On the drive there—where my wife also works—she decided to run a neurological exam. The questions were unfair and oddly personal: when were we married, where were we married, when is her birthday, and, in what felt like an advanced interrogation technique, what is the password to our financial accounts.

Because my injury did not involve a gunshot, a stroke, or a heart attack—and because I walked in under my own power—the hospital staff responded with polite professionalism mixed with the unmistakable vibe of let’s see what this turns into. This was reasonable.

After a short wait—which, in medical terms, is often measured in hours rather than minutes—I was invited to check in. Check-in involved a weigh-in, an IV “just in case,” and a full panel of vitals: blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen levels. All of this felt slightly unfair given that I had not yet taken my medication and had recently been tackled by frozen precipitation. At one point, I believe they also asked my body to “relax,” which suggested a touching but misplaced optimism.

Then came the questions, which demonstrated that my wife—though well-intentioned—was still very much an amateur. After the battery of questions, the staff turned to her and asked whether she had noticed any personality changes. She said I was more irritable than usual. This answer was delivered efficiently, confidently, and without hesitation. It is now, presumably, part of my permanent medical record.

After a CT scan and an MRI, it was confirmed that I had indeed “bonked” the back of my head. Medical terminology has a way of minimizing the unsettling. I did not break my neck—which aligned with my own independent research—but I did sprain it. I am now in a cervical collar, which sends a clear message about fragility, gravity, and the quiet power of ice.

I have been told to take it easy and to avoid complex thinking until my brain fully heals. This feels less like short-term medical advice and more like a long-term warning.

I should end by thanking my wife, whose compassion, patience, and steady presence have carried me through this with far more grace than I deserve. She has been unfailingly supportive, calm when I could not be, and generous with both care and restraint—except, of course, for the comment about my irritability, which has been entirely forgiven.

The dog, meanwhile, remains unconvinced. She watches me closely, tilts her head from time to time, and appears to believe that my collar is essentially the same as hers. In her mind, this confirms that I am ready for a walk. Healing is fine—but the schedule still matters.