” To trudge: the slow, weary, depressing yet determined walk of a man who has nothing left in life except the impulse to simply soldier on. “
Paul Bettany as Geoffrey Chaucer, A knight’s tale
My son posted this scene to social media today and it struck me as being poignant to our current circumstances. We are in a time which can be described in Seussian terms as the waiting place. there is no way to go back to where we were and no clear way forward from this place. To get out we must trudge.
There is something so very cathartic about the trudge, the deliberate step after step forward towards an inevitable end that is beyond our current control. I hope you dont hear me as defeated in this term, it is far from it, this primordial movement is beyond defeat. This movement of placing one foot in front of the other is one I have felt during hikes in those last hours before making camp, it is the experience of staying the course for that assignment we are doing. When expecting the birth of our children or moving the last of a pile of soil or mulch in the garden.
The trudge has with in it a resigned hopefulness that our every move and moment takes us inevitably to our next destination and all the joy and sorrow that will come from it. Often, as we see Paul Bettany portray in the movie A Knights Tale , the trudge is undertaken alone. We may pass others during our trudge and they may notice our naked vulnerability, some may even choose to join us in solidarity as we trudge, trying in some way to carry some of the burden, but it is rare that we trudge in community and even rarer that we trudge on a national scale as we are at this time.
At this time when we look left and right we are all making our way through a strange and unusual time of trudging as we seek collectively to feel like there is some worth or purpose to our current situation. In the past I found that such trudging in community is best done in cadence and it is no coincidence that people who trudge together gain endurance and moral from allowing their steps to align as soldiers in the march or hikers in the trail song.
My thanks to Zac for this post, for I now walk in step and recall that we all at this time trudge together.
So true – it’s very Bear-hunt-esque.. we can’t go over it, we can’t go under it – we have to go through it.
yours, a fellow trudger.