Ultimate Challenge 365: A little walk

When I sat down to write this article, I thought that I was going to write about unemployment and the struggle to find a new identity without a job.

I've hinted at this topic in my previous article. I know a few people who are currently dealing with the loss of a job and all of its attendant frustrations and fears.

Whether or not we've personally experienced some bad times in the current economy, it doesn't seem like a big stretch for any of us to imagine what it would be like to have 40 hours or more of our lives each week suddenly without an anchor, and no answer to that ever-present question "so, what do you do?", which for an adult, is really a question about who we are.

Instead, I found myself thinking not about creating new identities in the void of joblessness, but about using the opportunities in our circumstances, like losing a job, to express who we always were.

I have a friend who lives in Chihuahua City in Mexico for part of the year.  He runs a guide business down there; his passion is inviting people to go for a "walk" with him. And he means it: when you are with him, you are just walking through your environment, walking your way toward your life, walking through your life.

He's not interested in showing you how to strap on eighty-pound packs that bend you double, encourage you to buy the most expensive hiking gear you can get from the big outdoor retailers to hike Mt. Everest, or to leave your family for a month in order to run the Iditarod with a team of sled dogs (I was wondering how I was going to sneak a reference to Fort Kent activities into this article), to hole up with coffee and a donut while you put the finishing touches on your thesis, to spend hard-earned cash in countless hours on the therapist's couch, or the most common extreme behavior that many of us engage in - putting long hours into following the lives of imaginary characters on TV (reality shows count as imaginary, too).

What he does is to help you, ordinary you, with just the things that you bring to your everyday life, from your aggravations and your responsibilities to your kindnesses and your self-defeating behaviors, to just put on your ordinary shoes... and go.

That's how he started - he left his house in Asheville, North Carolina, turned around, locked the door, and started walking.  He eventually ended up in Mexico, living with the Tarahumara Indians in Copper Canyon.

Now one of the trips that he offers every spring is a chance for his students to run with the Tarahumara, who are known for their long distance races (we would call it ultramarathoning), in which they can cover from 50 to 100 miles without stopping.  Which granted, is sort of an extreme thing to do, but the point is that anybody can run in the race, regardless of whether you finish or not, and if it appeals to you to try, he will help you to do so.

The connection with unemployment is that this friend of mine ended up walking to Mexico and from there founding this business, because he had lost his job due to a medical condition which prevented him from working long hours. With no money, and required either to remain jobless in order to receive benefits from the government or unable to work enough to pay for his living expenses, he brought into this no-win situation some luck and a lot of effort.  He found a path to something in which he believes deeply.  He has a passion for what he does, which is showing ordinary people like you and me a window into the Tarahumara's rich, vibrant, colorful world - a world not so consumed with, well, consumption.

How many of us can say that we feel passionate about what we are doing with our lives?

Regardless of whether we are one of the unfortunate casualties of the economic times or not, it is important to remember that who we are might not be so much about what we are doing as how we are getting there.

I think that the greatest lesson that my friend has to teach through his example is that our lives are an adventure, if we want them to be, and that we can achieve amazing things simply by putting one foot in front of the other, regardless of whether we know where we are going to end up.