God I love walking…without it I would lose much of my time for realization.
Footprints in the snow are a reflection of the path that both we have walked upon Life and that Life has walked upon us. Just as we leave imprints on the area we travel – the impressions we leave with the people and things that surround us, those same people and things create similar effects on us.
As we walk along our path, we can see where the footprints ahead of us have gone, creating different paths for us to follow. Their existence makes us more likely to follow them, which is an important point to make because we are the threshold of Life. While it is important for experiences of the past to serve some role in guiding us towards our future, it is important to balance this constraint with the freedom of exploration. Once you leave the beaten path, everything becomes a fresh path of exploration, and there is a lot to be said about laying the first tracks. Not in some kind of self-promoting way, but rather in a self-effacing way – we beat the path so that others may follow.
This kind of attitude prevents the meager acceptance of things as they are; it would rather you to be prepared to get your feet wet and make some new tracks in the snow. If we don’t lead ourselves to harmonious understanding, true greatness, it will be a goal forever from our reach – the only change comes from us. Our generation is better educated than any previous one, and more capable of achieving our wants due to the fact that our basic needs are almost entirely covered for – thinking of Maslow’s hierarchy, this allows us to consider more complex needs for fulfillment.
Footprints in the snow – we leave marks on others’ paths just as others have left their marks on us. At first, the snow of our fields was light and fluffy, freely accepting whoever would choose to encounter us – there was a freedom of our space. However, undoubtedly due to the pains of growing, we may have invested too much of ourselves in others traveling our paths, not content just to be and sustain life, and so the snow on our paths has become pressed down, thick and hard, no longer allowing things to so easily penetrate its surface. This becomes our ideal of strength, becoming strong enough to hold off the woes of the world, removing from yourself the ability to be hurt by always maintaining some kind of distance or separation between ‘yourself’ and whatever it is you may be dealing with. Only the snow that has been separated from the field could feel this way, for it has forgotten the freedom of freely giving itself. Once we start thinking only of us and only what’s good for us, we lose our perspective as to the rightness of things. What’s right for us isn’t necessarily right because we are no longer viewing things from a complete perspective. It’s like a paintbrush that tries to hold onto the paint it’s been given – eventually it dries and ruins the brush. It is more important to give what we have been given than to accumulate what meager possessions we can over our short lives. Our lives are bereft of all meaning except what we put in them – knowing this we should be more conscious of the paths we take, and the directions we turn. Rather than staying to the same over-walked ways, we should use the paths previous generations have made in order to explore further and grander fresh fields, thereby leading future generations to them, and beyond.
We all know that it’s easier to walk in the tracks other’s have made; it keeps your feet drier. Therefore we should know that the people who will see our tracks will be more likely to follow them than to make brand new ones in the same area. They will rather expand from the impression we made, until slowly we have explored every inch of that field. So if you thought that being a piece of shit was ok because the only person‘s life you REALLY ruined was yours, think again – anyone stupid enough to look up to you will without doubt commit most of the same mistakes as you; it would be better to step up and be a real individual and change the situation of yourself.
We are all on the same path together, and it’s not a race. It’s a pilgrimage, on whose road it is always better to offer a hand of assistance. Instead of seeking to glorify yourself by making yourself as better than other people as you can, you should rather seek to glorify them by making them as good as you are.