The Next Step Is All You Need to See
What December darkness teaches about trusting the path, both inner and outer
If you’ve been turning on more lights lately, you’re not alone.
Maybe your calendar has somehow filled itself with events to survive rather than experiences to savor. Maybe you've caught yourself counting down to when this dark stretch is over, or noticed an urgency humming beneath everything, a voice insisting you just need to make it to January. If any of this sounds familiar, you're not alone.
But I want to ask you something. What if the darkness isn’t the problem?
How We Avoid the Dark
December asks something of us that we’d rather not give.
It asks us to slow down when everything around us speeds up. It asks us to be still when the culture demands productivity. It asks us to sit with uncertainty when we want answers, plans, and resolution.
So we resist. We fill the hours. We turn on the lights as the early evening sets in. We schedule ourselves into exhaustion, as if busyness could protect us from whatever the darkness might reveal.
I do this too. I notice the impulse to push through, to treat these weeks as obstacle rather than invitation. To get to the other side of the solstice without actually being present for it.
Years of walking have taught me this, both on pilgrimage and in my own neighborhood after the sun goes down. The darkness has something to teach.
We just have to stop running long enough to hear it.
What the Avoidance Reveals
Our resistance to December darkness isn’t really about the weather or the early nights.
It’s about what stillness surfaces. It’s about the discomfort of not-doing in a culture that equates productivity with worth. It’s about the uncertainty that lives in any genuine threshold, any space between what was and what’s coming.
We’ve built entire identities around staying busy, staying lit, staying in motion. The dark season threatens all of that. It asks: Who are you when you’re not producing? What remains when you stop performing?
These are uncomfortable questions. No wonder we keep the lights on.
But the questions don’t disappear because we avoid them. They just wait, patient as winter, for a moment when we’re still enough to listen.
The Invitation to Walk
I’m not going to tell you to sit in the dark and meditate.
Instead, I want to invite you to walk.
Not a brisk walk to get your steps in. Not a walk with a destination and a deadline. A different kind of walking. The kind where you step outside after the light has gone, and you move slowly, and you let the darkness be what it is without rushing to escape it.
This is available to you tonight. You don’t need special equipment or extensive training. You need a door, a path, and a willingness to be present with what’s there.
When you walk in darkness, something shifts. Your other senses sharpen. Your pace naturally slows. You can’t see far ahead, so you stop trying. You learn to trust the next step, and then the next, without needing to know the whole route.
This is what pilgrimage has taught me over five Camino walks and countless evening walks through my own neighborhood. The path doesn’t require you to see everything. It only asks you to take the next step.
The Darkness Within
Physical darkness isn’t the only darkness we’re avoiding.
There’s the grief we haven’t finished processing. The questions about purpose and direction we keep postponing. The slow unraveling of certainties we once held. The awareness of a world in crisis and our uncertainty about how to respond.
This inner darkness doesn’t respect the calendar. It doesn’t lift when the days grow longer. And most of us manage it the same way we manage December: we fill it with noise, stay busy enough to avoid what’s stirring, promise ourselves we’ll deal with it later.
But later rarely comes on its own. We have to walk toward it.
The gift of December is that it offers us practice. When we step outside into literal darkness and discover we can move forward without seeing far ahead, something shifts. The body learns what the mind resists: we don’t need clarity before we take the next step. We don’t need the whole map. We need only willingness to move, and trust that the path will meet us.
This is how we navigate inner darkness too. Not by waiting until we can see clearly. Not by filling the silence until the discomfort passes. But by walking, one step at a time, letting the way reveal itself.
The Inner Path
The outer darkness mirrors something inner.
We’re all walking through seasons we can’t fully see. Grief that hasn’t resolved. Uncertainty about what’s next. The slow work of becoming that refuses to follow our timelines. The weight of what we know about the world and the not-knowing of how to respond.
The practice is the same, whether the darkness is literal or metaphorical. You don’t need to see the whole path. You don’t need to understand everything before you move. You need to trust the next step, and then the next, and let the way reveal itself as you walk.
December’s early darkness is an invitation to practice this. Every evening, for just a few weeks, the world offers you a chance to walk with uncertainty rather than against it. To discover that you can move forward even when you can’t see far ahead. To learn, in your body, what trust actually feels like.
We still have a little time remaining before the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.
Beginning Tonight
For those drawn to extended practice, to walking with others through longer darkness, I lead a contemplative walking retreat on the ancient Le Puy Camino route each summer. Seven days of walking in silence through the mountains of southern France, letting the path teach what words cannot.
This upcoming walking experience will be during the day, though the darkness we will walk through is more our personal work in a dark world.
However, learning this practice doesn’t require a plane ticket or a week away.
It requires tonight. A door. A willingness to step outside after dark and walk slowly, without a destination, letting the December darkness be your teacher.
The solstice arrives in two days. The longest night. After that, the light begins its slow return. But we’re not there yet. We’re still in the descent, still in the darkness, still in the space where something is being asked of us.
What if you answered?
What if, instead of rushing toward the light, you walked with the dark for just a little longer?
The next step is all you need to see.
The darkness isn’t waiting for you to get through it. It’s waiting for you to walk with it.
You can begin tonight.
What would it mean to take a walk in the dark this week — not to get somewhere, but to be with what’s there? I’d love to hear what arises.
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Walking beside you through the longest nights,
~ Jeffrey
I love this - walking in the dark to let the light in, the next insight appears...
This is beautiful. I find so much solace in walking too, but I particularly love the insight about stillness. And more specifically, our fear of it. Even with all the inner work, and meditation, and practice I've done with stillness... I still get uncomfortable and struggle with it. :-) This was a good reminder to use this season as an opportunity to keep working with it.