A young pilgrim met the author and told him, after walking the hardest parts pilgrimage of the Eighty-Eight Temples of Shikoku, what he thought about the rest of the walk “was going to be easy and I didn’t think I’d get any more out of walking.”
The author answered, “Right, but that’s precisely when it gets hardest! Right when you feel like it’s no longer hard, because the hard parts kept it from being truly hard, you know? That’s what so much of this was about for me, at least in the end: continuing to walk when both the discomfort and the novelty have passed. Like, I don’t know, a long term relationship.”
Coaches know about this insight. And others?
Quotations are from: A Sense of Direction by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
photos: from a friend’s yard
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