About Paths and Roads

“The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way. The primitive road advanced by the destruction of the forest; modern roads advance by the destruction of topography.

– Wendell Berry, excerpt from A Native Hill

I chose the path, the humble path that gets there in the end, all the while respecting the environment, the settled communities, human and animal life alike. 

In coaching, we like to think all of us are naturally creative, resourceful and whole: we can find a path and there is no need to force through nature, carve or tunnel through mountain. We are not moved by speed and efficiency, rather by the beauty of the journey and the self discoveries we make on the way. There is a sort of admirable minimalism in finding a path of least resistance, of minimal intrusion, and letting ourselves follow that, perhaps like a stream or flowing river as opposed to blasting our way through the obstacles we encounter. A little like solving the proverbial mathematical equation in two elegant steps rather than a page long ramble.

Think that in certain hard to reach places, the high mountain, the deep rainforest, the humble path is the only viable travel option. Sometimes even the path is too much to ask and we must rely on the power of the stream or the river to find a way through.

This is the image I have for beautiful coaching: it involves finding the simplest solution to the most arduous of our life’s problems, in short a humble path that will go anywhere, reach any summit.