Back in the year 2000 I got a dog, a black labrador. I named him Milk Dud. He has since passed away, god bless his heart. He was a good dog.
When he was about four months old, I took him to the lake for the first time.
He didn’t like the water, however. In fact, he was deathly afraid of it. I tried to coax him into the water, but he wouldn’t go near it. Wouldn’t even put his paws in it, not even just a little.
“Come on,” I thought, “you’re a lab, you’re supposed to love the water.”
I rolled up my pants and waded in. I even took off my shirt and swam around, thinking that maybe he needed me to demonstrate what he was supposed to do. But no dice. He refused to go in.
At one point I got so frustrated that I got out of the water, dried off, picked him up, and threw him into the lake. He plopped into the water with a big clumsy splash.
He went under for a brief moment, and I’ll never forget the look on his face when he came back up for air. He had this crazed, panicked look like he was thinking, “Oh my god, I’m going to die!” I don’t think he was even aware that I was there anymore, standing nearby in case things went south.
After a few moments of flailing in the water, he started to dog paddle, and then another unforgettable look crossed his face. It was a look of realization, a look that said, “Oh, THIS is what I was put here on this earth to do.”
From that moment on I couldn’t get him out of the water. Whenever there was water nearby, whenever he so much as smelled water, Milk Dud had to go swimming. He was obsessed with it.
That’s how I feel now about us humans and walking. We were meant to walk. We were meant to walk long distances. We were meant to make eye contact with strangers. We were meant say hello to people we don’t know.
A couple days into this trip I had a moment of realization like Milk Dud did, where I woke up and realized that hey, this is exactly what we were put here to do.