It was about four years ago today, out of college, down on my luck, I took the roads hiking around, almost daily exploring new places. Without a job I could not pay for gasoline, so it was on foot that I walked, exploring my world step by step, mile after mile around my parents house in Westerlo.

I really do not know why I walked so far. A first I justified it as a way to loose a few pounds. Then I started to justify it as a way to explore new places, at a new detail impossible to do in the speed of a passing car. It was a way to pass the time. Whatever it was, I got out and I walked and walked and walked.

Some days I'd walk 10 or 15 miles. Sometimes it would be much less. I walked in the blistery cold of winter that year, and I walked in unforgiving heat, sometimes for hours. I passed dozens of farms, reservoirs, small town people trying just to get along, on dirt roads and high speed highways alike. I always was walking and making little observations on the world.

All this wandering took it's toll on my sneakers and left my feet with blisters. Yet, I need to walk and try to find myself. I had so much pain in my soul, and so many emotional issues I had to work out. There was always a legalistic theory I would be teasing out in my brain, or some kind of news story I felt I wanted to think more about.

Walking took some of the stress and strain out of my life. I was so stressed so pulled beyond my limits those days, that the open road, walked by hand, would be able to calm me to the point where I could make it through another day. Staying home, only made me more depressed, while the expansive landscape inspired me and gave me hope when this ordeal would soon be over.

These days, being fully employed and busy with social activism I have little time to be spend wandering around, trying to find myself or looking beyond the next corner. Those days without a job and without a college, spent hiking the roads around where good days, when I discovered myself and became a stronger individual. While I don't ever hope to go back to then, I feel my life improved because of such a time.