The Next Turn
Every walk has a moment.
Not at the beginning, when you're still deciding whether to bring a jacket.
Not at the end, when you can already see the car park.
Somewhere in the middle.
The trail bends.
And beyond that bend you cannot see.
My wife and I walk in the woods near our home. Sooner or later she says the same thing.
"Can't we just go and see what's around the next turn?"
Not because she knows what is there.
Precisely because she doesn't.
I have always liked that.
Most advice arrives with maps.
Five-year plans.
Roadmaps.
Strategic frameworks.
Step-by-step instructions.
There is certainly a place for such things. I earn my living in a world of purchase orders, delivery schedules, and logistics. If a truck carrying hydrochloric acid is supposed to arrive on Tuesday, "let's see what happens" is not generally considered an acceptable operating procedure.
Yet even there, reality occasionally votes.
The truck doesn't come.
The supplier doesn't call.
The plan discovers it was only a draft.
Life seems unusually fond of reminding us that certainty is often rented rather than owned.
And still we continue.
Not because we know.
Because the path bends.
Most of the important things in my life arrived that way.
Friendships.
Conversations.
Books.
The move to Germany.
The work that eventually became the Orchard.
None of them began with certainty.
They began with curiosity.
A slight leaning forward.
A willingness to see what was around the next turn.
I sometimes think we underestimate curiosity.
We treat it as a lesser virtue than confidence.
Confidence gets invited onto stages.
Curiosity goes for walks.
Yet confidence often depends upon yesterday's answers.
Curiosity remains available when the answers have stopped working.
Curiosity says:
"Well, let's have a look."
The old stories know this.
The knight reaches a crossroads.
The wanderer enters the forest.
The child opens the forbidden door.
The traveller follows a path that wasn't marked on the map.
Again and again the story moves forward because someone is willing to step where they cannot yet see.
Not recklessly.
Not blindly.
Just enough.
One bend further.
Perhaps this is why trail markers have always fascinated me.
Near where I live, the trails are marked with little yellow diamonds.
At first I thought they were directions.
Later I realized they were invitations.
Not instructions saying where you must go.
Signals saying where you could go.
A subtle difference.
One feels like obedience.
The other feels like participation.
These days I find myself increasingly drawn to participation.
To the possibility that life is less a problem to solve than a conversation to continue.
Not every turn reveals something dramatic.
Most don't.
Sometimes around the bend there is simply another bend.
A different stand of trees.
A patch of sunlight.
A bench.
A crow.
A conversation.
Yet over time these small discoveries accumulate.
A life is assembled less from grand destinations than from a thousand small acts of willingness.
The willingness to make the next phone call.
Write the next paragraph.
Ask the next question.
Take the next walk.
See what is around the next turn.
If there is a theme emerging in these early letters from the Orchard, perhaps it is this:
You do not need to see the entire path.
You only need enough light for the next bend.
The woods have always worked that way.
And perhaps we do too.
Until next week,
Scott
Meanwhile, at the Pond
A question to carry:
What is one next turn in your life that does not require certainty—only curiosity?