Running Laps.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring 

will be to arrive where we started 

and know the place for the first time."

TS Eliot

Do you ever feel like you've run this lap before?

Like you are beating a worn path,

treading over the same traces 

of the same footprints?

We are not children any longer

and our footprints don't reveal

in and of themselves

a steady growth,

evidence of a life growing in length

with shoes struggling to keep pace.

Our prints stay the same

and ask us to break patterns -- 

to lean bravely into 

the becoming, 

to venture beyond the staid 

and exhaustingly familiar --

to make the acquaintance

of the steadiness that answers

the wild call of the future, 

the one

that is hard won

through the pressing of feet;
through the passing of time.