Halfway up a mountain path in Ticino, the fog rolls in with almost no warning. A moment ago you could see the lake, the villages scattered across the slope, the ridge you were heading for. A moment later there is only a grey circle some twenty metres wide, and inside it nothing but wet grass, a few larches, the stone your foot has just landed on.
In Switzerland mountain trails are marked with three stripes of paint, white, red and white, on rocks and tree trunks. In good weather you barely notice them. In fog they become the only thing that matters. You see one, twenty paces ahead, faded on the stone. You walk to it. And only when you reach it does the next one emerge from the grey.
There is no way to see the whole path. There is no spot from which, standing still, it becomes clear where it goes. The only way to know it is to walk it, one mark at a time. Wait for the fog to lift before choosing a direction and you may wait all afternoon; keep walking, even slowly, and you arrive.
Many of the decisions that matter resemble that climb more than we like to admit. We would like to see the whole route before taking the first step: to know where a new job, a move, a project will lead before we have even begun. So we stay where we are, sometimes for years, convinced that standing still is the prudent choice. We tell ourselves we will start when we know more, when we feel ready, when the picture is complete. But the picture does not complete itself while we stand still. The clarity we are waiting for almost never comes before we move. It comes after, and it is the movement itself that produces it.
Headlights
In 1986, interviewed by The Paris Review, the American novelist E. L. Doctorow described how his books took shape. He did not begin with a finished plot. He began with an image, a sentence, a voice, and went forward without knowing where he would end up. Writing, he said, is like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
The line has become famous among writers, but it holds far beyond literature. Doctorow was not saying that the destination does not matter, or that one can drive with eyes closed. He was saying something more precise: that the light available is enough for the next stretch, and that the next stretch, once driven, lights up another. The journey is not known in advance. It is known by travelling.
There is a kind of calm in this image that we often mistake for recklessness. The night driver is not at ease because he sees everything; he is at ease because he has stopped demanding to see it. He watches carefully what the headlights show him, and trusts that it will be enough.
The wrong map
In 1977 the Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub published a short poem in the Times Literary Supplement, Brief Thoughts on Maps. It told a story he had heard from Albert Szent-Györgyi, the Hungarian biochemist and Nobel laureate, and it dated from the war.
A young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps sends a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy terrain. It starts snowing at once. It snows for two days, and the unit does not return. The lieutenant is convinced he has sent his men to their deaths. On the third day they all come back. They say they had thought themselves lost and had waited for the end. Then one of them had found a map in his pocket. They had calmed down, made camp, sat out the storm, and with the map had found their way. The lieutenant asks to see this precious map. It is a map of the Pyrenees.
The American psychologist Karl Weick, who spent his career studying how people make sense of confusing situations, has retold the story many times. His reading is simple and slightly dizzying: when you are lost, almost any map will do. Not because it shows the right way, but because it gets people moving. Once people move, they observe, compare and correct, and the terrain starts to answer back. Stand still waiting for the right map and you gather nothing new: you stay lost.
This is no hymn to improvisation. Those men did not set off blindly: they waited for the storm to pass, then walked with their eyes open. The map gave them a reason to take the first step; their eyes did the rest.
The story also works in reverse, and that is where it becomes uncomfortable. How often, faced with a choice, do we convince ourselves that one decisive piece of information is still missing: one more opinion, a fuller analysis, a clearer sign? Sometimes that is true. More often the information does not exist, or exists only further on, beyond the bend. Searching for it while standing still looks a lot like those two days under the snow, before someone found a map in his pocket.
Seeing by moving
That movement produces knowledge is not only a metaphor. In 1963 two American psychologists, Richard Held and Alan Hein, ran what became a famous experiment. They raised pairs of kittens in the dark and then, for three hours a day, put them in a carousel: a cylinder with striped walls and, in the middle, a rotating bar like the beam of a balance. One kitten, harnessed to one end, walked on its own. The other sat in a gondola at the opposite end and moved exactly as the first did, seeing exactly the same things. But it was not moving itself: it was being carried.
After a few weeks the difference was clear. The kittens that had walked could use their eyes: they reached out their paws when lowered towards the edge of a table, blinked when an object came at them, avoided the deep side of a drop. The kittens carried in the gondola, which had seen exactly the same world, could not. They had received the same images, but without moving they had not learned to see. A couple of days of walking freely was enough for them to catch up.
The psychologist James Gibson, who devoted his life to the study of perception, put the idea in one sentence: we must perceive in order to move, but we must also move in order to perceive. The world does not reveal itself to someone who looks at it from a fixed point, like a picture on a wall. It reveals itself to someone who passes through it, because every step changes the point of view, and depth comes from comparing one point of view with the next.
You can try this yourself, right now, no laboratory required. Close one eye and look around a room: objects flatten, distances become uncertain. Then move your head slightly, left and right. At once the near things slide past faster than the far ones, and depth returns. No new information has come in through the window: moving a few centimetres was enough.
The kitten in the gondola is an uncomfortable image, because it looks a lot like many of us. We can read everything about a profession, listen to those who practise it, watch other people’s lives for years, and still be unable to see the life we might live ourselves. The same images, received without taking a step, teach nothing.
Trying things out
Herminia Ibarra, who teaches organisational behaviour at London Business School, spent years following professionals who were changing careers, and in 2003 she gathered her observations in a book, Working Identity. The common belief, she writes, is that we must first work out who we want to become and only then act: reflect, take tests, write a plan, and finally carry it out.
Almost none of the successful changes she followed had happened that way. Those who made it had done the opposite: they had tried things. A side project, an evening course, a collaboration, a conversation with someone already doing the work. Small experiments, each of which showed something no amount of thinking at a desk could have shown: what they really enjoyed, what wore them out, whom they worked well with. The new identity was not the premise of the change. It was its result.
There is a reason why reflection alone is not enough. What we know about ourselves is mostly what we have already lived. Preferences we have never tested remain guesses, and often wrong ones: some people discover they love teaching only when they stand in front of a class, and others find they hate their dream job after a week of doing it.
Her conclusion, in essence, is that you do not find the way by thinking about it: you find it by doing, and then by thinking about what you have done. Like the unit with the map of the Pyrenees, or the kitten that walks, people changing careers discover that the missing information does not exist until they produce it by moving.
The path is made by walking
More than a century ago the Spanish poet Antonio Machado put it in two lines that have become proverbial: “Caminante, no hay camino, / se hace camino al andar.” Traveller, there is no path: the path is made by walking. They are usually quoted as a call to boldness. Read beside Held’s kittens or the unit in the snow, they say something more sober: the path truly exists only behind us, in the stretch already walked. Ahead there is the next mark, and nothing more.
There is a misunderstanding to avoid, though. Moving is not the same as being busy. Many of our days are full of apparent movement, meetings, messages, projects started and dropped, and poor in real movement. Busyness is often a way of not choosing: we do a great deal so as not to take the one step that matters. The movement Doctorow, Weick and Ibarra describe is something else. It is slow, deliberate, attentive. You take a step, look at what has changed, and decide the next one.
In practice, people who move this way tend to do the same few things. They choose the smallest step that can teach them something: not resigning, but spending a Saturday in the workshop of someone who does the job they dream of; not moving to another city, but living there for a month. They prefer steps that can be undone to steps that cannot, until they have seen enough. And after each step they stop and look, like someone who reaches a mark on the stone and searches for the next: what has become clearer, what less so, what they did not expect. That is what the step is for. Without the look that follows it, it is only effort.
This is what AlbaFiore calls Calm Performance. Not the calm of someone who waits for everything to be clear before moving, nor the frenzy of someone who runs so as not to think, but the steady pace of someone who accepts seeing only the next stretch, and walks it well. Clarity, in this sense, is not a starting condition. It is something earned along the way.
Behind you
On the path, meanwhile, the climb goes on. The white and red mark appears, comes closer, falls behind; another emerges from the grey. At some point, almost without noticing, the ground levels out and the air changes. Then the fog opens for a few seconds and below, much further down than you thought, the whole slope appears.
What you see above all is the way you have come. The hairpin bends, the wood you crossed, the point where the fog came in. From up here the route is perfectly clear, almost obvious, as if it had always been there to see. But it was not. From below, standing still, you would have seen nothing.
This is how life becomes clear: rarely before we move, almost always because we have moved. The fog closes again. Twenty paces ahead, faded on the stone, is the next mark.
