Dust

May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi.
- first-century Jewish blessing

You don’t need to know the big steps to take the little steps.
– Henri Nouwen, Following Jesus: Finding Our Way Home in an Age of Anxiety

I went hiking with my husband a few days ago. I’m no avid hiker, but you can’t live where I do in California and not take occasional advantage of the nearby parks, so we drove our way up the hills to one of his favorites. As usual, I let him take the lead on the narrow, sloping trail. One of the best things about walking anywhere with my husband is that I never have to worry about where I’m going—he has an uncanny sense of direction, besides being one of those people who likes to read maps for fun. I tell him how much of a workout I’m in for, we decide how long we have, and off we go, him striding off and me following behind.

This time of year, the trail is dusty and dry, and following means treading in the plume of dust he kicks up as he walks. I trail a bit farther behind to avoid breathing too much of it in, but I want to stay close enough to chat as we walk, so I inevitably end up covered in a film of dust. I don’t even quite notice it until I realize the next day that my sneakers are brown from a fine coating of dirt.

I occasionally think about what a strange turn my life has taken. The first half of life was like a well-paved path stretching decades into the future. That’s what medicine is like: it’s all laid out before you, one station after the next, a series of tests, applications, matches, rotations, and promotions that get progressively harder and more specialized as you go along. You don’t have to wonder much what lies ahead three months or ten years from now. You just have to perfect the skill set required to meet the next set of metrics laid before you.

In contrast, the second half of my life is a like a big walk to nowhere. My colleagues are honing careers at elite institutions; I stay home most of the week, though my kids are all in school. I’m in seminary, but pursuing as slowly as possible a degree that has no pragmatic purpose. I see patients and do procedures, but on such a limited basis and for such a constrained demographic that few can refer anyone to see me.

It's like the second half of my life is an unmaking of the first. Plans have unraveled into ambiguity. A life in the public sphere has morphed into one lived before the quiet witness of family and friends. The best parts of my life are things I can’t put on paper. Instead of straining to perform and legitimize my way to the next station, the path I walk now is more like the trail I tread behind my husband that day. I can’t see what’s six months ahead, much less ten years. But I don’t need to know where I’m going because I know who I am following. Life is lived one step at a time, and I just want to stay close enough to be anointed in a layer of dust as I go.

Learning to follow is a different way of life. Henri Nouwen says that most of us are “wanderers,” people who run around doing many things without really knowing why, or we are “just sitting there,” escaping through leisure but with no real movement or tension in life. In contrast, learning to follow Jesus is listening to the voice of love which says, “come and see.” It is not a searching for self, but an emptying of self, a call away from self toward God so that he may enter the center of our being. It's a breaking up of logic, a trading in of control for trust. It’s a journey of little steps. “Do not dramatize it,” Nouwen writes. “Listen, and you will know what your next move is. You will experience a desire to do it because it is always a move from fear to love.”

That’s the mystery of it all. It’s a letting go that doesn’t feel like a loss, an open-endedness about the future that doesn’t feel like lack of purpose, because it is always this attractional movement. Sometimes it is hard, it is hot and the sun is beating down as you climb with the sweat running down; sometimes it is beautiful as you round the bend and catch a glimpse of the hills laid out before you. Most times you can’t tell what lies ahead. But always it is where you want to be, in the presence of who you are following, trailing after in a cloud of dust.