Another thought I had hiking this last section was that I’m useless. I expect many of you will hear that and say “oh no, that’s not true.” But in the end, feeling useless turned out to be a gift. Let me explain.
As I was hiking along, a young guy went past me and within what felt like minutes he was at least a mile ahead of me down the trail. I had the thought that no matter how hard I try, I just can’t do what these other hikers do. I thought about how all my life I felt I had to work harder than everybody else just to appear normal in the world. And I worked so hard to do things to please other people and so feel valuable by being useful.
When that guy went was by me, I just had an overwhelming sense of being useless. But then, right away I had the sense that it’s OK to feel useless. That all my life my sense of worth was tied up with being useful. But out here all I am is an old lady walking. I don’t know that it has much use for anyone but it seems like the right and OK thing for me to be doing in the moment. And that came with the realization that I could let go of needing to feel useful. It helped me remember that my worth is not connected to doing anything useful, but rather in just being who I am.
Out here the only thing I have to offer is connection to the people I meet. And I realized that was more than OK. I thought about how all the connections people have made with me over the past four years have helped me heal from the painful way that Mark ended our marriage. And ironically I realized that the more I could just be me, with honesty and not hiding, making genuine connections with other people, the more useful I felt in the world.
It made me think about how everything is a gift. All of us can be a gift to each other just by connecting and being real. And certainly all of nature is a gift. Some of it brings hard lessons and some of it brings so much beauty that at times I wonder how it is that I can be exposed to so much beauty in one day.
It was interesting to see that giving up all my sense of being useful brought me full circle to understanding that the way that I’m useful is not by what I do but rather just by being who I am, even if that is just an old lady hiking.
The Mary Badass 
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