Brazil sometimes love needs to move

A man watching television one night stopped when he saw a character walk into the wilderness as a form of prayer for his daughter. The scene felt familiar, not foreign. He had been doing something similar his whole life without a name for it.

The first time was in his twenties. He had just met the woman he would marry. She lived seven or eight miles away. He could have driven, but he wanted to see her and felt the need to travel on foot. He walked up University Drive, past strip malls and traffic lights, onto the side of the highway. By the time he reached her door, his legs were tired and his shirt was soaked. He was happy. He had pushed himself to endure on the way there. She deserved that. He had learned that tenderness often needs to move through the body before it can reach another person.

His parents live about five miles away. He has walked that distance many times. Walking past the corners and yards where he grew up changes his state of being. By the time he arrives, he is fully present and appreciative of the gift of seeing them.

Sometimes the person he moves toward is his son, who has worn the number five in sports since he was small. When he learned that Brooks Robinson, a Hall of Fame third baseman he admired for his talent and kindness, had worn that number too, he walked several miles to a baseball card store and back. He wanted his son to know his number had been worn by someone worth looking up to, and it felt right to make a journey of it.

Once, carrying stress from work, he hiked fourteen miles to the beach. He did not tell anyone. He kept going until the street ended, the ocean was in front of him, and the tension had fallen off his shoulders. These long walks have always been a way of transferring something from the inside to the outside. A way of saying, with his whole body, that a challenge, person, or moment matters enough to be honored.

A few years ago, his daughter was going through a hard time. He and his wife tried everything to support her. He was left sitting with the helpless feeling every parent knows, the one where you would trade places with your child if you could. Sometimes all you can do is love someone from a distance and hope it reaches them. He had done everything else he could think of and come up empty. So he laced up his sneakers and headed west.

He moved past bus stops and plazas, past vacant lots where the city thins out, past the point where sidewalks end and the land becomes wilder. It was cold for South Florida, probably in the low forties, but he kept going. He went until the last gas station was behind him and there was nothing ahead but open space. He stopped at the fence that marks the beginning of the Everglades. The sawgrass stretched to the horizon, and the sky was endless. Nothing out there knew his name or cared what he was worried about.

His feet ached. His lungs had worked hard. He had exhausted himself to get there. Standing at the edge of that wilderness, he let himself want her to be okay in the most raw, undefended way he could manage. He stood there a long time. Then he turned around and made his way home. When he got back, the temperature had dropped into the thirties. He went to the backyard and got in the pool. The cold hit him like a wall. He stayed in that water and thought about her the whole time. It was a small act and maybe a foolish one. But it felt like the truest thing he could do.

He does not know if any of it helped her, though she is doing better now. He will not pretend the road or the cold water had anything to do with that. But he thinks he understands now what he has been doing out there all these years. When love gets deep enough, it builds up inside you, and it needs to move. Some people talk to friends, some write, and some hold on tight until things get better. He pours himself out in the direction of the ones he loves until he is spent.

He has learned that no matter how much we want to, we cannot always change things for those we hold dear. Something about accepting that takes time and distance. Walking is how he works through what he cannot resolve so he can be more fully available and grounded for the ones he cares about. The scene on television that night touched him so deeply because he had been doing what that man did long before he saw him do it on the screen. Neither of them had a better option, and neither of them needed one. The man went out into the wilderness for his daughter, and he walked to the edge of the Everglades for his. We do not always have the answers, but we have the love, and we find ways to keep expressing it anyway. He thinks that might be the most human thing there is.