The feet never lie. I’ve known this truth forever. It was perhaps the very first thing I knew. When I was ready to stand, I asked my feet. My feet never lied. One day, I asked again, and my feet gave a new answer. They were ready. I stood and remained standing, my infant feet supporting me all the while.
Infant feet are an amazing sight. The soles are tiny and incapable of holding the world’s newest weight. Sometimes, baby feet look a lot like baby hands. It is a great mystery that these feet are the beginning of what carries us throughout a lifetime.
The newborn lifestyle is always short-lived. Everything comes to the infant, everything is new, and everything is enough. The world is love and togetherness and revelation. The infant gets everything it needs. One day, the world becomes insufficient, the world is no longer enough. Where is the world? The question sends the attention wandering, out to where it came from, out to where it is going, out to the beyond. The question brings the infant to its feet.
To see a baby stand for the first time is a bittersweet experience. It leaves behind the stability it has known to begin a lifelong search for balance. It seeks a place in the world, the place where it belongs, the place from where it will fall. To stand confirms that presence is no longer sufficient. The world no longer gives what is needed. The feet grant independence by shackling the child to solitude. It introduces accumulation by enabling a search for enough. The standing baby never looks back.
As the child answers the question of the world, the feet take on their unique shape. The toes stretch and reach, using balance to build stability, absorbing the past to form a foundation for the future. The ever-present imprint stamps every freshly explored ground. Each path is new and each footprint is the seed for the journey ahead.
The walking child is a reminder of the wonder of learning, of mobility, of novelty. On two feet, the world changes, the world ends, the world becomes possible. Each discovery cultivates the trailblazer’s ethos, the joy of discovery, the excitement to see what is next. The exhilaration of movement speeds us up, faster and faster, a walk becoming a jog, a jog becoming a run, a burning desire to see what comes next.
The feet do not need to learn because the feet know how to balance us, the feet know how to carry us, the feet know how to run. This is what the runner knows. When we run with joy, our light strides skim us over the grass. It seems hardly plausible that we touched the ground at all. It is only the footprints we leave behind that ground us, that tell the story of where we’ve been, a testament to our hurried impatience to get from here to there and back again.
Every first step is like a walk into the fresh snow. With every new step, the possibility of another step is born. The trail of footprints tells a story. It proves who was first and reminds us of where we came from. It tells the story of how we made our mark. A meandering, wandering line is lonely evidence of tentative steps taken slowly, begrudgingly, while a firm, unbroken line shows our confidence and assurance. Our lifelines express the individuality of a journey and the uniqueness of presence. Each step into new ground creates new ground; each forward step is a beginning. But a path traversed once cannot be pioneered again.
A great gift of mobility is the joy of following in someone’s footsteps. This new delight makes up for the loss of the explorer’s excitement. The wonder of tracing steps teaches us empathy. We see the world through another’s eyes, walk the paths forged by another’s steps, and gaze up from the bottom of another's depths. We delight in what we share. We learn how to walk together and come to cherish the steps made in tandem, in balance, to create paths we can travel to common ground. We dread the always lurking fork where the paths diverge and we must forge on again, alone.
We learn that just one step in another direction can separate anything, that one step can change everything. This is the truth a runner knows. A separation is always a moment away. A hidden root, a broken sidewalk, a rough patch, and we are separated from our place in the world. The feet, forever two parts of one, no longer belong together, no longer bring the critical balance. Their shared paths diverge as one bears the burden imposed by the other.
When we run with pain, our heavy gait drags us across the pavement. With each step, the feet prove again that they are forever ready to carry us, no matter how our burdens weigh us down, no matter how heavily each stride hits the ground, no matter how unsteady a once balanced path becomes. But each pained step is proof that we cannot run on forever, that things do end sometime, that what we tie together is destined to come undone.
The feet never lie. Each limping stride hints at the end, a step closer to the last stand. Eventually, the feet will let us down. I learn this lesson when I spend time with the sick, with the bedridden, with the dying. The feet that once were such reliable supports are no longer there.
A person’s feet tell the story of a life. Those who still leave their footprints have different feet than those who do not. The dormant feet no longer leave their mark. The feet that go unused take on a different shape. The toes retreat from full stretch and curl back toward the familiar. The soles that once discovered the physical world now prepare for the return to eternity. Our feet begin to take on, once more, our infant forms, and as we come off our feet we exchange our solitude once more for dependence.
The feet never lie. They always tell the truth about our journeys. The natural resilience of youth gives way to the endless accumulations of wear and age. Every burden borne without balance reveals itself in the feet. The soles know pain, carry pain, absorb pain. A foot pain is a clean signal, a stoplight burning red. The truth of it is sometimes learned step by step, sometimes learned the hard way, but we all learn it. Every step of a journey is checked and approved by the feet.
The feet never lie. This is the truth a runner knows. One day, I responded to their pain. I understood the path I was on and sought a new way forward. I adjusted my stride and improved my balance. The feet that had once unevenly worn down my sneakers came together again. I found new ground for my footprints.
My improvement allowed me to run through new weather conditions. I was no longer thrown off balance by the wind or the rain. I grew to enjoy running in the snow. The best time to run in the snow is at the start of a storm. At the start, the wind is cold but calm. The day is like any other and everywhere is within range. Each step forward is one beat closer to the unknown destination.
One day, the snow started and I ran. It invaded the cold stillness in a soft flutter. I zipped through the solitary flakes and floated over the dry ground. I left no trace of my presence. The snow shrank into the ground and disappeared, embarrassed by its early arrival. As I ran on, the snow started to stick, started to forge connections, started to establish new ground. Each step hit the ground a little harder and each stride met with a little more resistance than the last. The snow’s relentless accumulation cut off my options, threw me off balance, and forewarned of the end. My path became the evidence of a fruitless struggle. As the initial possibility gave way to a bleak reality, I took the hint that maybe it was time to get back home, to return to where I belonged, to where my feet are always the first to arrive and the last to leave.
As the end approached, a sudden idea came to mind. My feet were telling me something and I slowed, stopped. I turned around to look back at my feet, at my path, at my footprints. The snow continued to fall as I gazed on my footprints, each step bearing witness to where I’d just been moments before, each depression slowly filling with fresh flakes. I doubled back alongside my path, forging a new trail, a second line tracing a parallel to the first.
I crouched low to ground as if I were about to crawl again. I studied my own footprints. They were, as I’d hoped, good enough, each footprint even and balanced, leaving the same impression on every step of my path. I’d left my mark, a set of footprints in the snow, a fleeting moment of enough on a long journey home.
