From time to time I am asked, perfectly straight forwardly, what super power I would like to have. At this point, I would like the ability to see old footprints on pavements, charting where I’ve walked on familiar routes.
At certain stages of life, we seem to repeat the same journeys all the time. Home to school. Work to home. Home to the library, and so on. Evoking my superpower would be like being able to magically reveal fingerprints on an object, but show how we chart our course, day by day.
Will we find that we just keep to the same lines each time? Will we detour? Will the tracks look like we burned rubber, or be more like linear ripples, sometimes meeting the mark, sometimes coming unstuck?
Part of the intrigue, for me, is that we can’t tell. But I believe that there are stories bound up in the footsteps. Days that we hurried, days that we dawdled. Days that our prints showed bravado, others where we barely had the reserves to put one foot in front of the other.
Perhaps our stories are also like the steps themselves. Will beauty emerge from repetition? Will we find that the story flows when we step away from the familiar path? Dante confirms the latter. Various mom blogs suggest the former.
For now, our steps move from one familiar ground to home turf. Time to change pace – and time to listen out for the staccato of the footsteps as we walk out our routes, our stories, and the meanings between the two.