As a youth worker for so many years it always feels like September is a start point of the work year. Although I rarely stuck to the path this September for the first time in maybe over 35 years I don’t have a clear work path for the year ahead. So it seems apt to post this thought I shared via Facebook when I decided it was time to move on.

There’s a line in an old Celtic blessing that lingers in the mind  “May the road rise to meet you.” It’s the kind of phrase you might find on a bookmark pressed between the pages of a book, or spoken at the end of service. It’s gentle, but to let it hum with its real quiet, persistent power demands we recognise that the road rises, you meet it as you step forward. Its solidity is made manifest with each step.
This road is Not the tarmac artery that thrums with the pulse of traffic, but the quieter ones: the footpaths that snake through fields, the cobbles slick with rain, the tracks that vanish into the hush of a morning mist. These are roads that don’t announce themselves. They invite you in, and then, step by step, they reveal themselves as you go.

The trouble with writing is it’s too head oriented, indulge me and stand up and lift your foot to step forward, and imagine as you go to place your foot there is shift and road has physically risen to meet you. I like the embodiment of this exercise, the feeling somehow we step and everything changes, the road is not where you expect it to be, each step feels a little odd but there’s a new oneness to the step.

Most of the time, we don’t really know the road we’re on. The blessing doesn’t say, “May you always know where you’re going.” It doesn’t promise a smooth journey, or even a clear signpost. It simply hopes that the road, whatever road it is will rise to meet you.

So the act of being human is that I will keep walking, and trust that the ground will appear beneath my feet. Sometimes, it’s only in looking back that we see the shape of the road at all. But here’s what I’ve learned: taking each step, especially the ones that lead us away from the familiar, is how we move from what is known into what is possible. The roads we know, the well-trodden lanes of habit and orthodoxy, can be comforting, but they can also become ruts, grooves that keep us circling the same old certainties. There’s a subtle courage in stepping off those paths, in letting go of what we think we know, and trusting that something greater than us is changing the laws of the cosmos so the road can rise to meet me. .

Every journey away from the settled and the safe is a journey towards new practice, new knowledge. It’s how we shed the false skins of received wisdom and find something truer, something deeper, something more alive. The road that rises to meet us is not always the one we expected, but it is always the one that teaches us. It asks us to loosen our grip on the old maps, to trust the compass of curiosity, to let experience be our teacher.
Maybe that’s the gift of the blessing. Not certainty, but discovery. Not a guarantee, but a gentle encouragement to keep moving, even when the way ahead is hidden. It’s a reminder that the road like a mountain is not something we conquer or control, but something we meet, one step, one breath, one heartbeat at a time.

So let’s make a toast to the roads that rise, to the journeys that surprise us, and to the quiet courage it takes to keep walking into the unknown.