lessons learned, walking across the USA

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This morning I was looking in on Karin Jurick.  She had a link to this blog post summarizing some of the lessons learned by a guy who walked across the USA.

It's long, but I thought it was very interesting. Before he left, everyone warned him about every possible danger under the sun.  His experience was that it wasn't dangerous, and it wasn't scary, and that people were eager to be generous to him and help him, all along the way.

These are my favorite quotes from that long post, one by the walker/blogger, and one by someone else.

"We never give ourselves the chance to learn that our fears are baseless, because we isolate ourselves from the situations that can challenge our fears." -- this is meant not as "we work through our fears by doing scary stuff," but as "we discover that a lot of the things we were scared of aren't scary at all."

"The world is like a mirror; if you smile at it, it smiles at you." -- Peace Pilgrim

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