You Will Not Learn This Before You Begin. You Will Only Learn It By Going.
What actually teaches us has little to do with how much we know in advance.
The first time I teach a new subject, I prepared everything I could.
I read the literature, build the syllabus, map the session flows, and anticipate the questions. By the time I stand in front of a group, I feel as ready as preparation could make me.
Then the first student asks something I had not anticipated, and I understand immediately that all my preparation had only brought me to the threshold. The actual teaching begins on the other side of it.
Nothing had prepared me for that. Only the experience of standing there could.
Why Preparation Is Not the Same as Readiness
There is a distinction worth naming carefully here, because it applies to far more than teaching.
Preparation builds the confidence to take the first step. It organizes what we know, strengthens our belief that we can do the thing, and reduces the gap between where we are and where we need to be enough that beginning becomes possible.
But preparation is not the same as readiness. Readiness comes from inside the experience, not before it.
This is something I have watched play out across years of teaching, chaplaincy work at NYU, and five walks on the ancient pilgrimage routes of Europe. The people who arrive most prepared are not always the ones who learn most deeply. The ones who learn most deeply are usually the ones willing to receive what the experience is actually offering, rather than what they expected it to offer.
These are not always the same thing.
What the Path Actually Requires
A student came to me wanting to walk to help with stress and anxiety, namely to develop a contemplative walking practice.
Every time uncertainty arose about how long to walk, what to notice, or whether what they were feeling meant they were doing it correctly, they immediately reached for an answer on their phone. The answer arrived within seconds. The uncertainty dissolved. They moved on.
Several weeks passed this way, and something was not settling. The information was accumulating, but the practice was not deepening. They could describe contemplative walking with increasing sophistication. They could not yet feel it from the inside.
Then one morning, they walked without being able to look for anything because they had forgotten to charge their phone. Something uncomfortable arose and had nowhere to go except through them. They stayed with it. They kept walking. By the time they returned home, they understood something about their own resistance that no amount of reading had reached, because no amount of reading could have.
The struggle had done what the information alone could not.
It had moved the learning permanently inside them rather than leaving it on a surface they could close.
The Obstacle Is Not in the Way. It Is the Way.
Most spiritual and self-improvement content treats difficulty as a problem to be solved before the real practice can begin.
If I were more disciplined. If I had more time. If I knew the correct technique. If I could just get past this particular obstacle, then the real learning could start.
This is backwards.
What stands in the way is not blocking the path. It is the path. The difficulty that arises when you begin something new, the discomfort of not knowing whether you are doing it correctly, the friction of staying with an experience rather than reaching for a faster answer. These are not signs that something is wrong. They are the practice itself working.
This does not mean suffering is valuable in itself. It means that genuine learning has a texture that bypassed learning does not. When we move through difficulty rather than around it, the understanding we arrive at is not just stored somewhere we can retrieve it. It is woven into us. It changes how we see.
We cannot get there any other way.
Walking Is Something You Already Know How to Do
I want to say something to readers who have never walked a pilgrimage route and cannot or do not plan to.
Everything I am describing is available to you on the path nearest your front door.
Walking is something all of us already know how to do. Taking that familiar act into nature, a city park, a stretch of river path, a neighborhood street with trees, expands it into something it could not be on a treadmill or a screen. The living world responds. The body moves through space rather than staying still. Something in the nervous system that has been waiting for exactly this kind of attention begins to settle.
You do not need a week in rural France to access what I am pointing toward.
You need to go outside and walk slowly enough to notice what is there.
You need to resist the pull to search for what you are supposed to notice, and simply notice what you notice.
You need to stay with the question of whether you are doing it correctly long enough to discover that the question itself is the first thing the path is teaching you.
Am I doing this right?
This is the question that stops more people from beginning than any logistical obstacle I have ever encountered. It is precisely the wrong question to ask before beginning, because the path cannot answer it in advance.
The path answers it by being walked.
What Happens When You Keep Going
Perfection is not available at the beginning of anything worth doing.
It is not available at the beginning of a contemplative walking practice, a new teaching role, a difficult conversation, a season of grief, or a week on the GR65 with a pack on your back and new shoes that have not yet shaped themselves to your feet.
What is available at the beginning is the first step.
The first step is the only thing required, and it is enough. Because the second step becomes possible only after the first has been taken. The teaching embedded in the fifth step cannot reach you until you have walked through steps one through four. The understanding that waits at mile twelve of a long walk is not accessible at the trailhead. It is only accessible at mile twelve.
This is not a reason to delay. It is the deepest possible reason to begin.
Spring arrived on the path this week.
The living world is moving. The season has turned. Whatever you have been preparing for, whatever you have been waiting to feel ready enough to begin, the path is not going to reveal itself before you walk it.
It will reveal itself because you walked it.
Take the first step.
Do You Want to Walk Together?
If that moment outside opens something you want to keep exploring, go back tomorrow and explore the same spot, or even a short distance away. You may be surprised at what you notice.
If you want something a little more structured, the September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat on the Le Puy Camino in France offers an even more immersive experience. Seven days of walking the GR65 in a small group, with the practice not scheduled alongside the route but woven into every step of it. This is a solo practice within a small group to help free yourself from the challenges of the world for some much-needed time away, physically walking in the natural world.
Start outside. Start today. The earth is not waiting for you to enroll anywhere.