“We’re going to REI.” 

My fiancée looked at me with a mixture of incredulity and resignation. “It’s your call. But your mom will never forgive you if you miss this flight.”

She wasn’t wrong. At 1:35pm, a British Airways jet was planning to shuttle my mom and me from Seattle to Paris to begin our 40-day, 500 mile adventure. At 1:36pm, I had two possible futures: I’d either be on that flight, or excommunicated from my own family by an apoplectic mother.

Just to be safe, we left for the airport at 10am.

But at 10:05am, right as we turned onto the highway towards SeaTac, I finally vocalized the terrible truth I’d been chewing on all night after overhearing an REI employee describe how hiking shoes should fit the day before: my shoes (a pair of size 12 Merrell Moab 3’s I reluctantly and meticulously decided on after trying over 20 pairs of hiking footwear) were simply a half-size too small. 

Never mind my flight leaving, my mom waiting at the airport, and an increasingly exasperated fiancée. I needed bigger shoes, dammit! 

I could feel how glaringly close my big toe was to the front of the toe box. Was it my imagination, or were the shoes shrinking? They felt perfect the day before, until that fateful trip to REI and an overheard conversation convinced me that no, they were not perfect, they were actually insufferably, impossibly small, and the whole damn Camino was in jeopardy because of it.

“We’re going to REI,” I repeated, angling the car off the freeway, away from the airport, and into downtown Seattle. Danielle sighed, adding a hint of laughter at the end of a long exhale.

“This is such a Stephen thing to do.”

It is, isn’t it?

This whole adventure – from falling in love with the concept of a pilgrimage after reading Timothy Egan’s “A Pilgrimage to Eternity,” to accepting my mom’s invitation to walk the Camino Frances, to trying on and rejecting over 20 shoes, to hauling ass into an REI parking garage at 10am on a Sunday mere hours before I flew out on said pilgrimage – these were all decidedly “Stephen” things. Or “Hicks” things, if you prefer.

In fact, everything you need to know about me is likely summed up in these two beautiful truths, two unassailable facts that have both bemused and impressed my friends and family:

• I will commit to a 500 mile walk after reading a good book about it, with very little practical experience in distance walking aside from the basic locomotor functions my body performs to move my brain from place to place (screen to screen?) throughout the day.

• I will wait for the last possible second to decide what shoes to bring on said 500 mile walk.

I sped through REI, realizing with a certain embarrassment (and pride) that I could recognize individual employees from my frequent trips to the flagship Seattle store over the past few months. The new Merrell’s were in my hands in under 5 minutes (I ordered ahead).

Hustling back to the car with a fresh pair of 12.5 Moabs, I hastily switched insoles and shoes before jumping back into the car. So hastily in fact, I just now realized I left the stock insoles in, with the Superfeet aftermarket insoles sitting on top of them. My arches feel practically Roman with all this support.

“Let’s go!” I quipped, ignoring Danielle’s eye roll as I got us back on the road to SeaTac. It was a 10-minute side quest, all said and done. My toes and neurotic tendencies were satisfied.

Twenty minutes later, we arrived at the tearful goodbye stage of my adventure.

“The house will be so clean without you,” Danielle teased through the tears. 

I laughed and hugged my future wife fiercely. “I love you so so much. Enjoy all the 1:1 time with the kitties. I’ll text you every day as you’re waking up.”

I have a recurring fantasy where I can stop time. And there are moments when I’ll think “let me just press pause and stay here for a while.”

That final hug with Danielle was one of those moments.

(Sorry, crying again. One sec.)

*Sniffles loudly*

And this adventure – this 500 mile trek across a different continent, far away from my love, my work, my home – is it not just a way of pressing pause? Perhaps the metaphor starts to break if you think of pausing life like pausing a movie. After all, the movie doesn’t change when you unpause it – it just picks right back up, unchanged and unaware of the pause. The movie continues on, same as it ever would. Or does it?

What changes in the pause is you. You stretch your legs, you get a snack. You noodle on a character or storyline. You wonder if it’s real or just a dream the protagonist will wake up from. You debate with a friend about what it all means. The movie may be paused, but you – you’re changing. 

And inevitably, when you hit play – you’re different. The movie continues as it always does, but because you’re different, it’s different too. The experience takes on a different texture. Your frame has shifted. And it’s not the same movie at all.

So perhaps it’s our definition, our understanding of what it means to pause that needs adjustment. A pause is not a stop. And it’s not a state of hibernation. A pause is an action. A verb. An experience. It is what happens before you realize that something has changed. Before the realization that this movie, the one you’ve seen hundreds of times, is not the same one you’ve always seen.

Here’s to the pause. And a good pair of size 12.5 hiking shoes. Much more to come.

-Hicks