06/08/2026
What Are You Carrying?
If you could turn around and see every footstep that brought you to where you are standing today, what would you see?
Some would be light.
Some deep.
Some almost lost beneath the weight you were carrying at the time.
There would be confident footsteps and hesitant ones.
Places where you followed because everyone else seemed to know the way.
Places where you stopped.
Places where you stumbled.
And perhaps one or two moments when, for reasons you didn't completely understand, you chose a different direction.
None of us chooses where those footsteps begin.
We simply arrive.
Into a family.
A place.
A set of circumstances.
Before we understand anything about the world, the world is already teaching us how to walk through it.
One child learns to speak up.
Another learns to keep quiet.
One expects to be heard.
Another waits to be asked.
One grows up believing almost anything is possible.
Another learns not to expect too much.
Neither child sat down and chose these things.
They simply adapted to the ground beneath their feet.
And somewhere along the way, we begin picking things up.
A comment somebody made about us.
An expectation.
A disappointment.
A responsibility.
A fear.
A belief that we should be stronger.
Quieter.
More successful.
Less difficult.
More like everyone else.
At first, perhaps, they weigh almost nothing.
So we carry them.
And we keep walking.
Years pass.
Some things are put down.
Others become so familiar that we forget we are carrying them.
We simply adjust our balance around their weight.
Perhaps that is why two people can begin in similar circumstances and arrive in completely different places.
And why two people from completely different beginnings can somehow find themselves standing side by side.
A poor beginning does not guarantee a poor ending.
Wealth does not guarantee happiness.
Confidence does not mean someone has never been afraid.
And quietness does not mean there is nothing to say.
A life is not decided by its starting point.
It is shaped by thousands of footsteps...
and by what we carry while taking them.
Then, eventually, comes hindsight.
We turn around.
And from where we stand today, the path behind us can look surprisingly clear.
There was the turning.
There was the opportunity.
There was the warning we didn't recognise.
There was the moment we wish we could revisit.
If only I had known.
Perhaps I would have spoken.
Perhaps I would have walked away.
Perhaps I would have stayed.
Perhaps I would have chosen differently.
But there is something unfair about those words.
Because the person standing in those old footprints didn't know what you know now.
They hadn't yet walked this far.
They hadn't met the people you have met.
They hadn't experienced the joy, disappointment, mistakes and loss that taught you what you understand today.
We judge them using knowledge they had not yet earned.
And sometimes we ask them to have been someone they had not yet become.
I think about this sometimes when I teach T'ai Chi.
Before you move, you have to know where your weight is.
It sounds such a simple thing.
But if you don't know where your weight is, you cannot move freely.
Push forward when your weight is still behind you and you struggle.
Try to lift a foot that is still carrying your weight and you cannot move it.
First you notice.
Where am I standing?
Where is my weight?
Only then can you move.
And perhaps we are not so different.
We spend years learning how to carry things.
But very little time asking whether we still need to.
A label given to us as a child.
An old hurt.
Someone else's expectation.
A mistake we have punished ourselves for long enough.
A version of ourselves that once kept us safe but no longer fits the person we have become.
We may have carried something for so long that putting it down feels stranger than continuing to hold it.
But perhaps balance isn't about becoming strong enough to carry everything.
Perhaps sometimes balance comes from recognising what can be put down.
The footsteps behind you matter.
They brought you here.
The weight you carried mattered too.
Some of it made you stronger.
Some taught you things you could have learned no other way.
Some of it may never have belonged to you in the first place.
But none of it can be changed by wishing you had walked differently.
There are only three places your feet can ever be.
The foot already placed is the past.
You cannot move it.
But you can understand it.
The foot you are standing on is the present.
Before anything changes, you have to know where your weight is now.
And then there is the foot that has not yet landed.
For one brief moment it carries no weight at all.
It belongs neither to where you have been nor to where you are standing.
It is simply possibility.
Where you place the next foot is still yours to choose.
Perhaps that is what hindsight is really for.
Not to keep turning around and judging the path behind us.
But to understand what it taught us.
To notice what we are still carrying.
To put down what no longer belongs in our hands.
And then, a little lighter and a little more aware...
choose where the next foot lands.
Sheila Dickinson
Call now to connect with business.
