One Step
A journey of a thousand miles starts under one’s feet.
Lao Tzu (between 450-300 BCE)
Neither high up nor far away,
On neither emperor’s nor king’s throne,
You’re only a little slab of stone
Standing on the edge of the highway.
People ask you for guidance;
You stop them from going astray,
And tell them the distance
O’re which they must journey.
The service you render is no small one;
People will remember what you’ve done.
Hồ Chí Minh (1942/3 - 2006)
Our journeys start with one step. However grand, ambitious, or idealistic we may be, the small and ordinary lie at the foundation of our endeavours. Simple processes such as steps; supportive guidance such as milestones; on these are built the thousand miles. Metaphors in the vein of the ‘journey’ abound. They cover all our undertakings, they are old, and rich; they appear as
stories
Stories, like journeys, link together disparate parts.
and as
pathways.
Heidegger’s idea of the pathway (weg) that leads back to ourselves.
If we stand still, we eschew steps and guidance, so we avoid
change;
One of many other pages on change which is inseparable from setting out.
maybe we hide from change. Both writers convey to us the message that rather than become daunted, or frozen, by our ambition, we should come back to the first step, the ground from which we set out, and the simple support we need to do so. Like Hồ Chí Minh, at that point in his life, we cannot know the part we play, nor how
many more steps
Maybe the next one is the step/snowflake that breaks the branch.
there are to come. Setting pen to paper, taking one step; whatever the enterprise, that is all there is.
Quoting from classical Chinese seems like cheating; translations are endless and very varied, there is always one that suits any purpose. My choice here is from Lao Tsu - Tao Te Ching as translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English in 1972, it was published by Wildwood House ltd, London; this version lacks page numbers. The line is from the third verse of Chapter 64 (chapter numbering varies). While ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step’ is familiar to us all, the above is a commoner translation. The Hồ Chí Minh poem is from page 156 of his Prison Diaries as published by Thế Giới, Hà Nội, in the 2006 edition. He wrote these poems in Chinese while imprisoned by the Chinese Nationalist Authority during 1942-3. They were translated into Vietnamese in 1960, and then into slightly doggerel English by Đặng Thế Bính’s in the 1990s.
The photograph comes from the mud of Morecambe Bay in England.
Above, hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 28th March 2026
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