Fifteen years ago he was on my expedition crew, a twenty-eight day course with Voyageur Outward Bound School.
He’s thirty-one now. He’s finished all ten major long trails in America. Every mile of every one, on foot, no skipped sections.
Last week I picked him up at the western terminus of the Kekekabic Trail. It had rained steadily all night and straight through the day. He’d just walked roughly 3,900 miles from Vermont, somewhere north of eight million steps to that trailhead, give or take. We drove the twenty miles back into town for a pot of hot coffee and a hot lunch before I brought him out to my cabin.
The timing lined up with something else. My mom has been visiting Minnesota for the last nine weeks, and that was her last night in the cool air before flying back to Arizona.
My co-instructor from that expedition still lives in Ely. That evening he broke bread with him in town and caught up on fifteen years, while I cooked dinner for my mom.
After dinner I picked him up to spend the night on my couch and meet my 88-year-old mother. She was curious. The two of them talked well into breakfast the next morning, and she gave him a big hug before I drove him the twenty miles back out to the exact spot on the Kek where I’d picked him up the day before.
He wouldn’t take the shorter option. Nobody would have known if he had. Nobody was checking.
Before he started walking west again, at least another month left to finish the North Country Trail, we hugged it out. And he told me the one thing he still carries from that expedition fifteen years ago isn’t the wilderness skills or the twenty-eight days. It’s integrity. What it actually means, day to day, when nobody’s grading you on it.
That’s the whole post.
Integrity isn’t what you do when someone’s watching. It’s the twenty miles you drive back to the precise point you stopped, because you told yourself you would, and you’re the only one who’d ever know the difference.
Most of us cut that corner constantly. In small ways. The status update we call “done” when it’s 90%. The invoice we don’t double check. The commitment we quietly shrink because nobody’s tracking it but us.
He’s got one month of walking left. I’ll let you know when he closes the loop.
Richard D. Stuart
The Weekly Prescription
P.S. If you liked this, I wrote about a different kind of number a while back, the one that forces you to actually decide something. His eight million steps is that idea in boots. And if you recognized your own version of that twenty-mile drive somewhere in your business, the honest audit is a free 20-minute working call at yourwebguy.org/become-a-client. No pitch.