the story pilgrim

sharing sacred stories on the pilgrimage through life

travel

Breathe. Listen. Watch. Act.

by

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

Have you ever wondered how many people have come in and out of your life?

I have. Quite often.

Start at the beginning, and there is family. They are relatively easy to count. They may be the people closest to us, or they may not, depending on the relationship, but there is usually a number we can put on them.

Then we begin this wondrous journey called life, and the numbers become impossible.

We make friends at primary school, secondary school, college and work. We meet people socially. We walk down the street and speak to a stranger. We shop and interact with the person behind the counter. We sit next to somebody on a train. We watch people on the many screens that now occupy our lives.

Some people we are drawn to. Others, not so much.

Some become lifelong companions on the journey. Others play a part in our story for seconds.

But does the length of time determine the depth of the connection?

I don’t think it does.

We tend to think connecting with somebody requires conversation, preferably something deep and meaningful, but perhaps it can be much smaller than that. A look exchanged across a bustling high street. The brush of shoulders as two people leave a train on their way to work. A few words at the post office when all you wanted was one second-class stamp for your distant cousin’s birthday card, and you’ve somehow chosen the queue behind the person posting twelve parcels from their eBay sales.

These moments count.

I’ve been fortunate to travel and to live in different towns, cities and countries during my 56 years. When I think about the number of people I must have met, seen, heard and, occasionally, smelt along the way, it is impossible to comprehend.

Most of them I will never see again.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t matter.

Knowing people, or perhaps trying to understand people, has taught me how to connect. Acting has taught me that. Walking has taught me that. Travelling has taught me that. Sitting opposite somebody with a microphone between us has taught me that. Even working on an aircraft with hundreds of strangers for a few hours has taught me that.

And after all those encounters, I keep returning to something remarkably simple.

We have two eyes, two ears and one mouth.

Watch more. Listen more. Speak when there is something worth saying.

Connection doesn’t begin by making yourself heard. It begins by paying attention.

Perhaps that person sitting opposite you needs to talk. Perhaps they need to laugh. Perhaps they need somebody to notice them. Perhaps they don’t need anything from you at all.

Learning the difference is part of connecting.

For me, it comes down to four words.

Breathe. Listen. Watch. Act.

And sometimes the most powerful part of that last instruction is knowing when to do nothing.

Life in Transit

by

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Søren Kierkegaard

Life never seems to stop. I know, I’m stating the obvious again.

There is always something waiting. Projects to finish, messages to answer, people asking for our time because they trust us to show up. We complain about being busy, yet if all of that disappeared tomorrow, I suspect many of us would feel a little lost. Perhaps it isn’t the busyness we object to. Perhaps it is how we carry it.

I’m writing this from a hotel room at Heathrow. My window overlooks the two runways, and since checking in, I haven’t gone more than a few minutes without watching another aircraft climb into the sky or descend back to earth. Thousands of people arriving, thousands leaving, families beginning holidays, others returning home. Business trips, funerals, weddings, first dates, last embraces, every aircraft carries a collection of stories that will never meet.

Heathrow does pause for a few hours each night because of the agreement on noise. Then, before most of us have finished our first cup of tea, it begins again. Seven days a week, every week of the year.

Watching it from afar, I found myself thinking about momentum.

Life has a habit of moving whether we are ready or not. We finish one chapter only to discover another one has quietly begun before we’ve even noticed the page turning. I find myself at one of those moments now. Not at the end of something, but standing in the doorway between what has been and what comes next.

I spend a great deal of time wondering what life feels like for other people. Not what they do for work or where they live, but how certainty feels to them. When they believe they are on the right path, does it arrive with confidence or quietly without announcement? And when that certainty disappears, do they carry the same mixture of disappointment and relief that I sometimes recognise in myself?

I’ve stopped looking for definite answers to those questions.

What matters more is noticing that the questions are there at all.

There are days when my mind races ahead of me, producing thoughts faster than I can make sense of them. Years ago, I would have fought them, convinced they needed solving. Now I am beginning to understand that not every thought deserves an answer; some simply deserve a little space.

There is something strangely comforting about allowing uncertainty to sit beside you without demanding that it leaves. I cultivate it through action and harvest it through calm.

Perhaps that is what I was really watching outside my hotel window. Not aeroplanes, not runways, not Heathrow.

Simply movement.

Life carrying on whether I understand it or not. And somehow, that feels enough.

The Captain and The Kia

by

Champions keeping playing until they get it right.

Billie Jean King

A few years ago, if somebody had told me that one day I would be standing in a motorway service station discussing the finer points of a Kia Soul with a retired BOAC captain on his way to do a zipline with his grandson, I would probably have smiled politely and backed away slowly.

Yet there I was this past weekend, somewhere up north, plugged into a charging station, wondering why owning an electric car still feels faintly experimental once you leave civilisation behind.

Around town, it has been splendid, quiet, smooth, and economical. I charge it at home overnight and glide around Brighton feeling terribly futuristic. Long-distance driving, however, is another matter entirely. Britain’s charging infrastructure still seems to operate on the principle of “best of luck, everyone.”

I had stopped at a service station to charge the car, grab a coffee, and allow Todd the opportunity to inspect every blade of grass in the Midlands. When we returned, an elderly gentleman was standing at the front of the car staring at it with the concentration of a man trying to remember whether he had once driven one.

“Is this the Series 3?” he asked.

“I’m not entirely sure,” I replied. “I just drive it and hope for the best.”

He nodded immediately.

“Then it’s the Series 3.”

Within moments, we were deep into conversation about electric cars, mysterious dashboard symbols, and the peculiar reputation of the Kia Soul — a vehicle affectionately described by many as a shoebox on wheels. There is something deeply reassuring about two grown men bonding over mutual confusion with technology.

Eventually, he asked what I did for work.

“I’m cabin crew for British Airways.”

His face shifted slightly.

“I flew for BOAC,” he said. “Retired in 1989.”

And just like that, the conversation moved somewhere else entirely.

We spoke about flying, about passengers, about the rhythm of airports and time zones and the strange way aviation people always seem to recognise one another, even decades apart. He told me that after retirement, he joined the police force. Then I asked what had brought him onto the road that weekend.

He explained that he and his wife had shared the same birthday. May 23rd. She passed away last year.

There was a pause then, not awkward, just human.

He told me he had always wanted to do a zipline. She had never wanted to. So now, for the first time, he was travelling with his son and grandson to finally do one.

I remember feeling oddly moved by that. Not because it was dramatic, quite the opposite. It was small, understated, ordinary. The sort of conversation that disappears every day because somebody decides not to ask one extra question.

Before we left, I shook his hand and called him “Captain.” He smiled in a way that suggested he had not heard that word directed at him in quite some time.

Then we carried on with our separate journeys.

That brief encounter stayed with me for the rest of the drive north. It happened because of a car, or curiosity, or timing, or perhaps simply because two people were willing to remain open to interruption.

More and more, I think life speaks quietly, not through grand revelations or cinematic moments, but through these fleeting collisions with strangers who remind us that everybody is carrying a story, a grief, a hope, or a zipline they have not yet taken.

And perhaps that is what I really mean whenever I say:

keep listening.