216 Million Steps

Somewhere out there is a tech geek who figured out that if you’re lucky enough to make it to eighty years of age, you’ll take about 216 million steps. Yep, that’s about the sum total of your walk around the world while you’re in it. Okay, so what? It’s just some more numbers in the worldwide web of useless facts. But somewhere in all that lifelong shuffling, there are those rare fateful footsteps that out-step all those before them and determine the course of all those that follow. From those initial unsure baby steps, to the gangly strides of our youth, to the frenetic step-by-step climb toward the prestige of adulthood, to the midlife stroll with Dr. Scholl, to the slow waltz into the winter of our lives—somewhere in that myriad of footfalls are those rare ones, that very special out-of-step, which leads us on an unexpected journey, the quest to who we were destined to meet all along—our authentic selves.

How often is the choice of our direction dictated by the expectations of others? From the desire to please our parents, to the peer-pressure of our teen years, to the adulthood anxieties of trying to impress the boss and win the approval of our co-workers, how many of our 216 million steps are spent chasing after that illusive "one day" when we are promised that we will be happy? We can be content when we get that one championship, that one promotion, that one person, that will lead us to the joy we seek.

With such constant pressure to "achieve" and no time to just "be", no wonder we live in a time where stress has become the number one cause of illness. Each time we achieve any level of success, we are told to strive even harder for more. But is the shiny bling of collectible things that we are told to make the object of our life's journey really what we desire, or are they all just small ingredients in a larger recipe?

The recipe to a sweet cake can easily be found in a Google search, but where does one look for the recipe to a sweet life? Where does one undertake the quest for answers to life's most profound questions-The Big Ones?

Of course, the smaller quests in life are fairly easy. You see them ambling toward you from the horizon and you’ve got plenty of time to prepare. But there’s this weird thing about The Big Ones. They just sneak up on you with that one fateful footstep and you’re out the gate with seemingly no compass, GPS or Starbucks to go.

Lucky for us, when that propitious day arrives and one of those fateful out-of-steps brings us to a new crossroads in our life, perhaps it is best not to consult a GPS or to blindly amble back upon the highway of societies expectations. Maybe the whole purpose of these special steps is to lead us to the path of discovery. That same out-of-step that led Columbus to discover the world was not flat, that led Einstein to rewrite the concept of physics, can lead us to our own "acres of diamonds" which can only be found when we choose to blaze our own path. I speak of the path lit by wisdom, guided by the heart, that leads through the realm of imagination where the only thing that separates the impossible from the possible is what the “I’m” is capable of believing.