The Path

I was recently hiking around the mountains here and thought about the first people to create the path I was walking.

It wound through a gorge, up a mountain, and down the other bank. It involved gravel, paths, steps, and wires. Even more than the sheer fact of having to bring all those supplies up the mountain and then put them up, the people who had to carve these paths.

How did they do it? How did they know where to put the paths?

I can’t even imagine how it would have looked before the paths, maybe like an impenetrable wildness.

I would have been terrified, I’m one of those people who likes the certainty of a path. And not having one, would have been terrifying enough, having to build my own?

I could get behind having to build my own, it would take time, but if I had time and needed to, I could see myself doing one. But that is more because of a necessity, not an explorer spirit, or a desire to go off the path and see where it takes me.

And maybe this reflects certain things about my personality, a desire for order and defined lines and boundaries. A preference for a plan. An established order of things needed and the chain of events that should be followed. Perhaps I’m not a flexible person, well I bet I’m not.

But there needs to be people in this world who are not me, those who have the courage and compulsion to build these paths.

I believe I can be an innovative thinker and make a path if I want to and need to, but it doesn’t stem from a compulsion.

But it begs me to ask the question, what other paths am I afraid to step off of, real, imaginary, or mental? And can I change? Do I want to? I have faith in myself, that if I need to or want to, I can summon the strength to step away.