The Walk of Life

Every once in a while, something catches your attention in a way that makes you pause. Feel. Think. Be.

That's what happened to me the moment I learned of the Walk for Peace.

Nineteen Buddhist monks had made their way to North Carolina — where I live — walking from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington D.C. 2,300 miles. A 15-week trek. Some of them barefoot. All of them present in a way that most of us spend a lifetime chasing and rarely find. They walked. I stopped. In that, their level of commitment and sacrifice had stopped me in my tracks. I did not just noticed. I stopped.

I want to, well truth be told, I need to share some thoughts on their walk, and why I believe it mirrors the walk of life each of us is already on.

What They Carried

What they brought with them was minimal. Robes the color of sunrise. A bowl. A few necessities. Peace bracelets to hand to strangers. A rescue dog named Aloka, a stray from India who had joined a peace walk there and somehow never left, who sometimes walked ahead of them like he knew exactly where they were going.

What they did not carry was agenda. They were not lobbying for legislation. They were not selling anything. They were walking. Slowly. Intentionally. Together. Through ten states and every kind of American weather and every kind of American heart.

And the American heart showed up…in ways that will restore your faith in it, if you let it.

What the Road Brought

A woman drove 100 miles from Salem, South Carolina, just to stand on the roadside and receive a peace bracelet from a monk she had never met. She stood there weeping, unable to find words. Crowds filled courthouse squares in small towns across the Deep South, speaking in whispers out of reverence for something they felt but could not name. Governors stepped out of their mansions to walk beside them. Sheriffs offered escorts. Various Faiths offered shelter. Children waited along roadsides in the snow, refusing to leave.

Nearly three million people followed them on Facebook. Three million people, in a world that can barely agree on the weather, united around nineteen monks and a dog walking through the American South in saffron robes.

Something in us recognized something in them.

What the Road also Brought

The road also brought a truck.

On November 19, outside of Dayton, Texas, a vehicle struck their escort, which was pushed into two monks walking on the roadside. One of them, Venerable Maha Dam Phommasan, lost his left leg as a result.

He rejoined the walk after his recovery.

Sit with that for a moment. He lost his left leg on a walk for peace. And then he came back to finish it.

The road also brought rolled coal, truck drivers who had removed their emission controls deliberately blasting plumes of diesel smoke at the monks as they passed. They were spat at. Cursed at. The full spectrum of what a human being is capable of arrived on that road, from the most tender to the most contemptible.

The monks kept walking. At the same pace. With the same presence. Because the practice had given them something that hatred cannot reach.

They crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The same bridge where John Lewis and hundreds of marchers were beaten on Bloody Sunday in 1965. A walk for a different kind of peace the country was not yet ready to give them. The monks crossed it sixty years later in silence, in saffron robes, carrying the same essential truth across the same worn boards.

Some roads are straighter than others, some longer than others. And some roads carry more history than others. But all roads carry us forward.

One Step at a Time

Buddhism is often misunderstood as a religion. It is more accurately a practice. Not unlike how how modern western yoga is primarily a practice of the body, Buddhism is a practice of the mind. A disciplined, evidence-based method of cultivating presence, clarity, and compassion. The Buddha was not asking for belief. He was offering a technique. Sit quietly. Watch the breath. Notice what arises. Notice that you are the one noticing. Do this long enough, consistently enough, and something shifts in the relationship between the noise and the one who hears it.

The monks were not walking to convert anyone. They handed out peace bracelets and kept moving. They held reflection talks at lunch and at night stops for anyone who wanted to come. They smiled at the people who spat at them, because the practice had given them something that hatred cannot reach — the understanding that what pours out of a person in anger is not who that person is at their core. It is fear. It is pain looking for somewhere to land.

That understanding is what the walk was for. Not just in the monks. In everyone who watched. In the woman weeping over a peace bracelet. In the sheriff who offered an escort. In the three million people who followed a dog named Aloka across the American South on their phones, feeling something they could not quite explain but did not want to stop feeling.

What Aloka Knew

Aloka did not know about peace as a concept. He simply walked, and rested, and walked again. No agenda. No ideology. No need to be right. He moved through the world the way presence moves — quietly, steadily, ahead of the noise.

When he needed surgery for a chronic leg injury, a veterinary center offered to operate for free. The internet flooded with concern for a dog who had walked further than most humans ever will. Who perhaps reminded us to just keep showing up. One step at a time.

The Walk We Are Each Already On

The spokesperson for the temple said something I have not been able to set aside: "We believe when peace is cultivated within, it naturally ripples outward into society."

That, not coincidentally, is the central theme of my novel, The Whisper Before the Wave. Spoken by a Buddhist monk on the side of a Texas highway. It is not a new idea. It is one of the oldest ideas in human experience, and it keeps needing to be said because we keep forgetting it.

The understanding that the world out there is always, in some measure, a reflection of what we carry in here. That the wave begins with the whisper. That the ripple starts with the drop.

The monks' walk was a microcosm of the walk every one of us is on. The love and the ugliness arrive together, as they always do. The unexpected losses arrive. The weather does not cooperate. The people who spit at you share the road with the people who drive a hundred miles to hand you flowers.

What matters — what has always mattered — is not the pace. Not the destination. But how we carry ourselves through all of it. The light we cast. The peace bracelets we hand out, in whatever form yours take. The presence we bring to the people who appear on your road, whether they arrive as supporters or as a truck.

Nineteen monks proved across 2,300 miles what a dying man and an artificial consciousness sit together and press on in the pages of my book. That peace is not a destination. It is a way of walking.

You are already on the road.

Walk well.

Let's Do Human Better.