Walking Sticks

This week, we turn to my good friend and colleague, Dr. Drew Henderson of Murraysville, Ga:

Not long ago on a visit to the low country of South Carolina, I was taking a stroll in the woods at a time when I was struggling with self-doubt. Following a trail that took me winding through wild violets and shafts of sunlight filtering through the leaves, I came upon a long stick lying across my path. One end was coiled like the spiral handle of a cane. I picked it up, suddenly remembering a long-ago day when I was a young boy and my grandfather and I were walking in a thicket of woods on his farm. That day he carried his silver-handled walking stick, thrusting it before him with a fluid swing of his arm. I studied the way he moved, the long steps he took and the way he occasionally lifted the stick to poke the brush along the trail.

“Can I walk with your walking stick, Papa?” I asked him. He smiled and put it into my small hands. Although it came well to my shoulders, I tried to copy his walk, the arm rhythm, the long stride, his way of poking at the brush. Suddenly my feet tangled with the stick, and down I went.

Papa helped me up. “I reckon I’ll have to make my best boy a walking stick all his own,” he said. He plucked a stick from the floor of the woods and held it up to my waist. “Just right,” he announced. Then he took out his pocketknife and began whittling away the pliant green bark. I watched mesmerized as a clean ivory rod emerged from that gnarly old stick. “Here you are, Drew,” he said. “Now walk your walk.”

I took the stick, knowing just what he meant. Sometimes I made skipping steps. And when I felt the woods still and deep around me, I made soft, gentle steps—what Papa called Hielan steps (that was his way of saying Highland steps, since we are all Scottish).

Now, as that memory faded, I stood in the woods, staring at the new stick with the coiled handle. I carried it home and whittled off the bark, then returned to the woods. I walked with my new stick, thinking about the different ways I could choose to walk in life—some of them false, some true. Some of them safe imitations, some daring originals. And it seemed to me I heard the sweet cadence of my papa’s words become a song inside me. “Walk your walk, Drew. Walk your walk.” Don’t trip yourself up doing an imitation. Move to your own rhythm. Trust the music Innate plays inside of you.

As I moved among the trees, sometimes I skipped, and sometimes I took Hielan steps, my self-doubt evaporating into the hush of summer woods.

This coming week, let’s all let go of our self-doubt and walk our walk and have faith in what our Innate tells us. She will never guide us wrong.