Two men walked. One in chains. One until he dropped. Both were already free. That was the thought that hit me when I watched The Long Walk the other day and equally hits you when you hold Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom. One is the autobiography of a man imprisoned for 27 years who refused, categorically, stubbornly, magnificently, to be anything other than free. The other is a dystopian nightmare about 100 teenage boys who walk until 99 of them are dead, by Stephen King. 

Different stories. Same question underneath. What does it mean to keep walking when everything in you wants to stop?

King’s story, recently brought to the screen, is brutal in its simplicity. No weapons. No monsters. Just boys on a road, and a rule: drop below four miles per hour three times and you’re shot. The horror isn’t the killing. It’s the capitulation. You watch boys bargain with themselves. Make deals with exhaustion. Convince themselves that slowing down, just slightly, just this once, is survivable. It never is.

Mandela walked a different kind of road. Robben Island with a brutal lime quarry, a small cell and years of incarceration. But what strikes you, reading his account, is how little time he spends in self-pity. He was building something in his mind that his captors could never reach. A vision of South Africa that didn’t exist yet. He walked towards it, every single day, even when his feet never moved.

The captors in King’s story are the State. The captors in Mandela’s story are the State. But they never let voice inside say this as far as you go.

Most of us aren’t in a prison cell, or on a death march. But are we still walking forward or are we held captive by the same opinions we held at 25, the same fears we inherited or the a definition of what’s possible. Mandela didn’t become Mandela on the day he was released. He became Mandela in the years he spent refusing to let his mind shrink to the size of his cell. The walk was internal long before it was external.

King’s walkers who last the longest aren’t the biggest or the strongest. They’re the ones who’ve detached somehow; who’ve found a rhythm that the road can’t break. A kind of radical, almost frightening acceptance that the walk is the thing. Not the destination. So here’s the point, what truth are you now walking towards because you can’t see around the corner or the road looks too long?

What would you believe, about the world, about people, about yourself, if you were willing to keep moving past the point where it gets uncomfortable? Past the point where your current tribe starts looking at you differently?

Freedom, both these stories insist, is not given, it is not even taken. It is walked into, step by grinding step, by people who decided that the alternative, standing still, was the only thing they truly couldn’t survive.

The walk is long. It always has been, but walk it anyway.

I grew up in a little village not far from Exmoor and the coast. The air was different not close enough to smell the salt but with plenty of room to roam. I would wander the lanes with friends, kicking about with nothing in particular to do. Every now and then a car would pull up visitors or Grockals as they are known in Devon, the days before phones and sat nav they came with maps half-folded, asking the way to somewhere or other.

And we, being kids, thought we were hilarious. We’d send them on “the scenic route,” which was really a long circle of narrow lanes that led eventually back to where they’d started. Fifteen minutes later we’d be leaning against the gatepost, waving as they reappeared looking slightly more puzzled, slightly less polite. We didn’t mean harm, just mischief. Even as write it now I chuckle at the memory, I’m fascinated by the circularity of it, the traveller earnestly trying to get somewhere while being guided by someone who didn’t really know where they were heading in the bigger scheme of life either.It strikes me that this is how the church sometimes behaves. We’re asked for direction, to meaning, to community, to hope in a tangled world, but too often we send people down the same old lanes. We wave cheerfully, even triumphantly, when they come back round to where they started. All the while the scenery may shift a little, but the map the assumptions, the systems, the stories we cling to stays the same. Our other favourite thing to say to these earnest travellers is “well I wouldn’t start from here”.

In *Hospicing?Modernity*, Vanessa?Machado?de?Oliveira talks about tending to a dying way of knowing the world. She says we need to hospice not fix or glorify, what can no longer sustain life. Perhaps that’s what we’re called to now in the church: to stop waving from the gatepost, pretending we know the route. Recognise that realistically we shouldn’t be starting from here, not really understanding how modernity has bought us here anyway. Instead we need to attend, with love and honesty, to the dying illusions of control and certainty we’ve been peddling.

Maybe our task is not to keep the old roads open, but to walk with people into the woods, where the maps fall apart and new ways of seeing might take root. To recognise that transformation won’t come from clever shortcuts but from learning to grieve what’s ending, to compost our worn-out certainties, and to listen again to the land and to each other.

If we do that, if we dare to step off the loop, then perhaps the next time someone stops to ask for direction, we’ll point not down the lane but toward a horizon and travel there together.

if you’re interested in a Tricksters approach to systems and want to break out of the same old circles check out https://alchemyedge.co.uk/#what-we-offer-individuals