You are on a journey and you’ve been walking for what seems like a lifetime. It’s starting to feel as if you’re walking aimlessly, but the journey isn’t pointless, even if it’s hard to remember what the point is. While walking you start to notice that your legs feel as if they were working harder to walk slower, your ankles feel heavy and free and your feet start to stumble. You look down to see an untied shoe. It’s not that big of a deal, you can slow down and make it to wherever you’re going just fine.

You watch the laces on your shoe flow from side to side, they bounce up and down when they hit the ground and the small sound pleases you at first. But something about the laces starts to nag you. You realize that time seems to speed up when you’re walking slower, your ankle is really starting to hurt from the weight of your loose shoe, and your legs are heavy. You wonder if you’ll ever make it to where you’re going with untied shoe. If maybe making you walk slower isn’t the only harm the shoe can do, and after a while you wish that the shoe were just gone so you could stop thinking about it and proceed, but without the shoe you would hurt your feet, and so you keep walking and contemplate tying your shoe.

I was walking to lunch when I looked down and noticed my shoe had come untied, again. Most of the time when my shoe is untied I keep walking until I get to a get to where I'm going. Lately my ankles been hurting so much that even when my shoes are tied it's hard for me to walk at my usual pace. I realized that I had been doing the same thing with my life in some ways. That I had been slowing myself down and causing some possible long term damage instead of humbling myself and taking a break. Life gets hard sometimes, things get overwhelming. It's okay to stop and prepare. Even when life feels aimless you never what lies ahead of you.