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.