One Foot in Front of the Other

Consistency, Grit, and Becoming the Change

These past months, I’ve been walking paths in the dark. Both literally and figuratively. Places where I had become increasingly overwhelmed by the feeling that the world is so large, so fractured, and so far beyond my ability to influence meaningfully that I found myself retreating into cynicism, distraction, and, if I’m honest, periods of despair.

That is not to say I don’t recognise the privilege contained even within that sentence. I know people (friends, colleagues, people across the globe) carrying burdens far heavier than my own. People living with racism, war, displacement, homophobia, political violence, or the consequences of decisions made in service of greed rather than community.

Still, there are days where I look at the state of leadership, public discourse, and our endless appetite for outrage and division, and I feel the weight of it deeply. There are moments where I genuinely question whether thoughtful, compassionate, deliberate action can make any meaningful difference at all.

However… this morning, while out running before dawn, I realised that what is required of me right now is not certainty.

And probably not optimism either.

But consistency.

‘Consistency and Grit’
The Insightful Path

Consistency is not glamourous

One of the things I learned, slowly, through physical practice, training, long-distance walking, martial arts, and life more generally, is that we often do the work long before the moment arrives that asks something difficult of us. We practice when the stakes are relatively low so that, when life eventually calls upon us to be steadier, more courageous, more disciplined, or more compassionate than we currently are, there is at least some foundation already laid beneath our feet.

Elite athletes are celebrated in singular moments of performance, but almost nobody witnesses the thousands of ordinary hours that precede those moments. The early mornings. The repetition. The self-doubt. The injuries. The days where motivation disappears entirely and only habit remains.

Commitment is rarely cinematic.

More often it is monotonous. Quiet. Slightly uncomfortable. It exists in the tension between the person you said you wanted to become and the person who would prefer another hour in bed. And increasingly, I think there is something important hidden inside that tension.

As a young man, I sold most of what I owned and set out to walk across America. Part of me was searching for the spirit of my homeland. Part of me was probably searching for myself.

People sometimes imagine a walk like that as one long heroic act of endurance. But honestly, much of it rested on a simpler reality:

I had already decided.

Before I ever took the first steps, I had already spent time weighing the cost, considering what I stood to gain, what I stood to lose, and whether the experience was worth the suffering I knew it would involve.

And because I had made that decision consciously, deliberately, I no longer needed to renegotiate it every morning.

That mattered more than I understood at the time, because once the decision was made, something became quieter inside me. Not easier exactly. The walk was hard. Profoundly hard at times. But there was relief in no longer arguing with reality every dawn.

Pain still existed, of course. Blisters existed. Loneliness existed. Heat, exhaustion, uncertainty, injury… all of that existed.

But suffering lessened once I accepted the terms of what I had chosen.

Each morning developed its own familiar rhythm. Wake up. Make breakfast. Pack the gear. Study the map. Check the next water stop.

Then walk.

One foot in front of the other.

‘Choosing fully’
The Insightful Path

I think commitment does something important to a person when it is chosen fully.

It removes a certain kind of internal friction. It reveals whether your values can survive contact with discomfort, boredom, fatigue, loneliness, repetition, and the slow erosion that occurs after novelty disappears.

And perhaps more uncomfortably, it reveals the distance between who we imagine ourselves to be and who we actually are when nobody is watching.

I’m thinking of my running now, and when I first began to run, decades ago, as a 17 year old rural Mid-West boy. We lived about five and a half kilometres outside town, and during wrestling season I became mildly obsessed with the idea of ‘grit’. Not toughness in the performative sense. Something more subtle, but, I believed, more powerful… endurance. The ability to continue after comfort disappeared.

Like many slightly isolated and overly serious kids, I consumed endless stories about athletes, discipline, and mental toughness. Somewhere in that process, I decided I would run into school every morning for the entire wrestling season.

Mid-Western winters are not particularly sentimental about a teenage boy’s self-improvement project.

I still remember those mornings vividly. The cold air burning my lungs. Frozen gravel beneath my shoes. Farm lights glowing in the distance. The neighbour’s barn emerging slowly out of darkness.

‘Leaving to return’
The Insightful Path

And I remember learning very quickly not to think about the entire run all at once… Just get to the end of the driveway; then the hill; then the barn; then the airport; then the bridge. And eventually, without quite noticing when it happened, I arrived. I would think about the hot shower waiting for me at school. I knew the cold would eventually end. I would be warm again soon enough.

At some level, even then, I think I understood something important: meaningful things usually ask something from us before they give something back.

Not in a grand heroic sense. Just in the ordinary reality that growth often requires us to tolerate discomfort, repetition, uncertainty, or inconvenience longer than we would prefer.

And increasingly, I wonder whether modern life trains us away from this understanding.

So much now encourages immediacy. Reaction. Distraction. Convenience. Performance. But most things that have shaped me meaningfully have emerged slowly and often quietly enough that I only recognised the transformation in retrospect.

Years on the mat. Walking. Running. Parenthood. Building work. Returning to difficult conversations instead of avoiding them. Trying again after failing at something I thought I had already learned.

‘Teaching grit’
The Insightful Path

Lately, I have been thinking about all of this in relation to fatherhood.

About what it means to help children become resilient, thoughtful, grounded human beings in a culture that often rewards performance more quickly than integrity.

And somewhere inside that reflection, I found myself confronting an uncomfortable truth:

There are changes I hope for in my children that I am not yet fully embodying in my own life.

I don’t really like to admit that. Because it is easy to admire discipline abstractly. Easy to speak about courage, honesty, steadiness, restraint, compassion, attentiveness. Much harder to live those qualities consistently when tired, uncertain, reactive, or discouraged.

I found myself thinking about the parable of the mote and the plank. About how easy it is to locate the problem externally (politics, institutions, culture, leadership, systems, ideology) while postponing the slower and more confronting work of examining ourselves honestly.

Not because larger systems do not matter. They clearly do.

But because analysis can become its own form of avoidance when it distances us from responsibility.

Several wise men in my life, independently and without coordination, reflected versions of this same truth back to me over recent months. Not through grand speeches. Mostly through small observations about consistency. About integrity. About becoming trustworthy to your own commitments.

I have carried those conversations with me.

And so lately I have returned to running again. Returned to training. Returned to trying to build meaningful work even while wrestling internally with larger questions about leadership, public life, conflict, and the direction many things seem to be heading.

Not because I have arrived at clarity.

If anything, perhaps the opposite.

But I am beginning to suspect that steadiness matters most precisely when certainty disappears.

‘The moments of difficulty’
The Insightful path

I am also trying to relate differently to difficulty itself.

The conversations I avoid. The situations where I feel exposed or uncertain. The moments where taking a position carries consequence.

Even in coaching, facilitation, public service work, and some of the more adversarial or emotionally charged parts of professional life, I am trying (imperfectly) to resist being pulled entirely into outrage or reactivity. To remain capable of curiosity a little longer. To tolerate complexity before collapsing into certainty.

Some days I manage this better than others. The theory is always easier than the practice.

But perhaps that is obvious enough that it hardly needs saying.

Most worthwhile things seem to reveal themselves only through repetition. Through returning. Through continuing after the emotional intensity that initially carried you forward has faded.

I think this is part of why physical disciplines continue to matter to me.

Walking long distances. Aikido. Running. Carving. They all contain some relationship between repetition and revelation. You learn something about yourself through continued contact with fatigue, frustration, rhythm, boredom, discomfort, limitation. Usually very slowly. And often not the thing you expected to learn.

‘the Zen of daily maintenance’
From the Insightful Path

So for now, I keep returning to small disciplines.

Getting up early. Running. Training.

Trying to build honest work despite uncertainty.

Trying to notice where I ask more of others than I consistently ask of myself.

Trying, imperfectly, to remain useful rather than merely reactive.

Some days this feels meaningful. Other days it feels very small against the scale of the world’s problems.

But I no longer think meaning is found primarily in scale.

I think it may have more to do with orientation. With whether we continue trying to align ourselves (however imperfectly) toward something decent and steady amidst all the noise.

Most mornings still begin in fairly ordinary ways.

Coffee.

Shoes by the door.

The brief hesitation before stepping out into the cold.

And then, eventually, movement.

One foot in front of the other.