Stepping stones: a metaphor for approaching daily life

My husband and I went tramping last weekend. It was the first time we had been in over a year. We used to go every other weekend, but wedding planning, working and thesis writing kind of got in the way for a while. So we started out with a 2 ½ hour tramp in the Waitakere ranges, west of Auckland. 2 ½ hours doesn’t seem very long but my legs were quite sore the next day, there was a lot of uphill and downhill. One of the tracks that we walked along ran down the side of a stepped waterfall called ‘fairy falls’. It certainly was enchanting. However, the track also zig zagged across the river about 5 times (or it just felt like 5 times).

Now one of the things that I don’t look forward to when tramping is river crossing. Firstly, I don’t like getting my feet wet, not when I could be tramping for another couple of hours – eww soggy socks; and secondly, my tramping shoes are really good at gripping in mud but hopeless at gripping slippery rocks so at some point I usually smack my ass on a rock (if I’m lucky – sometimes it’s in the water).  When I do get over the river it is such a sense of accomplishment. I go from ‘oh bugger, how am I going to do that’ to ‘yay, I did it, that wasn’t so hard’.

I’d been reflecting on this this week. As it was my last week of work (looking for the next opportunity), I’ve been pondering how on earth I managed to accomplish some of the things I did. A lot of the projects I completed I started out having no idea how I was going to accomplish them, there were plenty of ‘oh bugger’ moments. But I kept the end goal in mind; I wanted to get to the other side. I planned my route; which stones offered the best traction? And I adapted my plan if my foot slipped.

It’s a metaphor for the challenges we face in daily life really. Now, looking forward, I’m just taking it one stepping stone at a time.