Early in 2024 life got a little heavy and so I picked up and went for a long walk on the West Highland Way trail in Scotland. While the sun played shy and stayed behind the clouds much of the trip, that didn’t deter me from enjoying the walk through long glacial carved valleys, admiring the beautiful lush green munros, the quiet lakes, and beautiful cottages I’ll forever want to go back and stay in. As the WHW is one of the great walks, it was expected that there would be many people on the trail. But even so, each day I found silence and solitude, sometimes for hours at a time. And as with the few other walks I’ve done, I met people from all over the world that became part of the story of my journey. That’s the beauty of a great walk, to experience the landscape of a foreign land on foot, to walk paths carrying so much history, and to meet others along the way that you would never likely encounter otherwise. One such person was a German woman who is 67 and just finished chemo and radiation for breast cancer. She’d had her entire upper body reconstructed and merely a couple of months later was walking 100 miles in 6 days. I hiked with her and her friend for half a day, and it was such a joy and inspiration to be a part of her healing journey. She reminded me that courage often times is as simple as taking the first step forward. She also reminded me not to underestimate how fast a 67-year-old can walk!