I signed up for this… in the name of the local GAA club as part of a national fundraising event where a club might gain some prize money if its members and friends can walk 4000km during a five-week window of opportunity. In honesty and more personally, I signed up because I know I need a push to do a bit of exercise. Like many, I go through times when I am good at exercise, but these times get overshadowed by my default setting of ‘taking it easy’!! So watch this space… hopefully there might be less of me occupying it.
Coming back to the name of the project. It is such an obvious title but one that might merit a bit of reflection too.
- A step towards reconciliation
- A step towards a healthy lifestyle
- A step towards sobriety
- A step towards deepening of faith
- A step towards community involvement
- A step towards more wholesome family time
- A step towards honesty
We are still in the days of New Year’s resolutions and, though we know that a date is even set when these most likely fail, maybe we don’t let that hold us back. Negativity is so draining and destructive. Can we try to park it in the early days of January with our eyes fixed on December?
Is there a step that needs to be taken? The answer is obvious. It is fair to say that each one of us could be doing at least one thing better than we are currently managing. To look at the entirety of what we might need to achieve or hope to achieve may well be daunting. More than that, doing so might render us incapable of anything resembling achievement. All too easily, we might shake our heads, allow the heart to sink and say “What’s the point? I tried this before and look where that got me… nowhere.”
Finding himself in that situation one night, he went to the local shop to buy a new pack. Coming home, he looked at it and, for the first time saw the message ‘SMOKING KILLS’ written on the pack”
Back then to the five-week walking challenge and, more pertinently to its title – “EVERY STEP COUNTS”. Think of the faith… a small prayer today, a candle left lighting in the local church, five minutes of someone else’s Holy Hour, a decade of the Rosary… are all steps and they all count.
The crucial step is the first one! I met a man once at a wedding reception. It was my first and last time to meet him. He told me that he smoked sixty cigarettes a day and that he could not go to bed if he had only one or two cigarettes left in a packet. Finding himself in that situation one night, he went to the local shop to buy a new pack. Coming home, he looked at it and, for the first time saw the message “SMOKING KILLS” written on the pack. He shouted to his wife who had gone to bed, “I’m giving up the cigarettes”. She laughed but he threw the pack in the fire and never smoked again. The first step was the message on the pack, the next step was his.
Every Step Counts.
Attitude is the key
A friend and classmate from secondary school died last year. Literally larger than life, a lovely story was recalled in a piece written about him after his death. Sitting outside a Galway pub on a Tuesday evening, cigar in one hand and a glass in the other, he spoke to a tourist who commented on him enjoying himself and he welcomed her to Ireland and assured her he had enough money to last him the rest of his life. “That is,” he pointed out “if I die on Thursday!”