Your mind is a forest, and your thoughts wander through it. If you spend enough time on the same thought, walking back and forth from one place to another, over and over again – your footsteps wear a path through the undergrowth. The more you use the path, the easier it becomes to follow it – for better or worse.

If a path tends to carry you off into places you don’t want to go – consider stepping off the road. Whenever you find your feet retracing the old familiar rut, stop walking. Take a smaller trail, it might not even be a trail proper, just a byway that meanders back into the woods and carries you far away from the highway your feet have worn into the ground.

Making new trails is hard work – you’ll most likely encounter resistance, brambles that snag at your clothes. You’ll want to give up and stay on the path that’s easy and familiar, even if it only ever leads you into haunted and treacherous places. Don’t give up, not yet. At least try.

Some of us have a particular disadvantage because we slept in late on the morning when they handed out the compasses and the maps and the right shoes and clothes for walking and the tools for making new trails. We’re stuck tangled in the raspberry canes, amid the poison ivy rashes and the bug bites and the mud. But hell, the breeze is fine, and the sunlight shining through the leaves above is pretty.

Our minds are like forests, and our thoughts wander through them – sometimes moving with purpose, trying to find some place we used to go back to often, trying to carve out a new trail. Sometimes we’re just walking for the sake of walking, keeping an eye out for neat looking mushrooms, listening to the birds.

Even when we have to crash, or stop and rest because we’re tired and it’s getting dark and the coyotes are singing in the distance, we go on. We get up, brush ourselves down, keep putting one foot in front of the other. One step at a time.