Look: go.

I hike the same trails over and over again, multiple times a week generally, getting lost and found over and over again in a landscape that’s so familiar I could probably walk it with my eyes closed. But it’s so much more exciting to keep them open, since I never know what I might see on any given day, what little surprise is in store for me – a raccoon skull at a bend in the trail under the redwoods, 5 wrapped sticks of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum placed at strange intervals on a mile-long steep uphill stretch, an owl feather. All of those things happened in one week, last week, just by the way.

The point is that I keep my eyes open because I never know what the woods have in store for me, what little surprise the trail will cough up for me, right there in my path.

And because, truly, I need to watch where I put my feet.

I used to be a much more timid hiker. I’ve always been afraid of falling, something possibly influenced by how many times I can remember falling down long staircases in my childhood, a childhood somehow filled with long, steep staircases and a need to move quickly up and down them, generally in answer to an urgent summons from my parents. Fear of getting in trouble was always greater than my attention to my own feet, terror of the slap or the harsh word greater than any concern for wiping out, for chipping a tooth, cutting my face, falling down the stairs. We always seemed to live on a hill, too, which was filled with its own potential for falling when rushing home, on roller skates, on a handmade go-cart of the neighbor boy’s, careening down the sidewalk on the run in the dark of a full-moon summer night.

Driven by fear, I moved thoughtlessly, blind to where I put my own feet. And so I missed something.  I didn’t grow a sense of my own ability to navigate safely, down stairs, down hills. I would just expect to fall, entire body braced for impact, even when there was no reason to rush around sightless.

The thing about practice, though, about walking the same trails over and over again, is that I’ve built skill and confidence. Sections of trail that used to scare me, that I used to creep down, now no longer bother me, now that I’ve hiked them so many times, figured them out, gotten comfortable.

And now that I actually have my eyes open.

Sure, I’m always sweeping the trail, alert for treasure, bones and feathers. But mostly what I’ve learned is to balance looking where I put my feet with looking where I want to go, eyes a bit higher, trained on the destination.

I look up, where I want to go.

This is a basic skill, one I can remember hearing even when a friend’s Mom was helping me learn to ride a bike without training wheels, on their gentle block that lacked our precipitous decline to the cliff-edge of Castro Street and its buses and cars. Don’t look down: look where you want to go.

Truly, that lesson’s taken a long time. It’s been days, weeks, years of hiking alone, really, that’s learned it for me, that’s made it part of my body, so that I can walk with confidence in the woods, leaping from one side of the creek to the other, scrambling up, climbing down. Eyes open.

Eyes looking where I want to go.

It’s such a basic lesson that carries over from the trail into the rest of my life. I keep my eyes trained on the place I want to be. I see where I am, love it. And then I jump, and take it with me.

Where do you want to go? Look there. Go.