A first step, and the way opens

By Orlando R. Barone

Walking. It's so pedestrian, if you know what I mean. Until you wake up one day and find you can't, not without excruciating pain. It took me a week of such pain, a bunch of X-rays, and an MRI before the pain's source, a herniated disc in the lumbar region, was determined to be the culprit.

It was during this trying time I came to learn the inestimable value of walking. Oh, I'd been alerted. After my heart attack a few years ago, my doc told me walking was the very best thing I could do to aid recovery. My mom always insisted that walking was essential to my well-being. This was literally the case: If I spent too much time in front of the TV, I'd be forcibly evicted from the house.

Pope Francis too is a huge fan of the pedestrian arts. You see him hopping from the confines of his pope-mobile frequently, wading into crowds, clearly enjoying the liberation afforded by the simple act of stepping out. "Anything can happen when you are walking," he has said.

He speaks of a culture of encounter, a world where we walk toward one another, meet in the town square, share our commonalities and our differences. Catholics in general have made walking a holy act. When I was in Galicia, Spain, I became aware that many to this day hike hundreds of kilometers to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela from the French border. The journey is known simply as "the camino," the walk.

Then, of course, there is the Way of the Cross, the walk Jesus took to Calvary and crucifixion. In commemoration, Catholics walk around the church, praying at each of 13 "stations," in the tragic, salvific trek. The first Christians called their faith, "The Way." It was seen as a particular way of walking through life. Everyone, after all, can walk.

Until they can't. When I could no longer walk effortlessly, the act became something other than pedestrian. Everything, even the house across the street, became distant, inaccessible. I could get around by car, but now that car was less a mode of transportation than a prison. My physical therapist taught me to count the number of steps I could take before the discomfort became unbearable. The number at first was one.

I instruct a freshman business course at Wharton. Through acute pain I became acutely aware of the importance I attach to walking, how integral it is to my teaching style. I was simply unable to stay put. I required myself to walk toward my students, move close to them. Walking is an act of engagement for me, encounter, as the pope might see it.

Engagement is the word several of them used following the class. Still on my feet, suppressing the near insuperable urge to wince, I greeted them as they left. "Your class is very engaging, Professor Barone." "You really engage us."

I am a good teacher, an excellent speaker. I used to think it was my lively voice, good eye contact, and firm command of the subject matter, and I am not wrong about these skills. What I have come to appreciate is my implacable need to walk. Perhaps it is a metaphor of my students' "camino," their pilgrimage through those corridors of learning. I look into their wide eyes, slightly frightened gazes, and I so much want to walk with them.

To educate them, yes, for educate at root means to lead out, out of youth into maturity, out of darkness into light. Yet my urge to walk has other motivations. To join them, to experience again and again the hilarious intemperance of youth, their voracious obsession with their own unexplored potential, their ineffable willingness to strut briskly into a scary, bracing future.

It is easier to walk their way today. The magic of cortisone and careful ambulation leaves me relatively pain free. What that pain has taught me is a lesson you must not fail to absorb if your own walk is to achieve its full meaning. Each step is a miracle. We know that when we see a baby take his first. We must simply remember that every step is a first, an entry, an encounter.

The walk. It is anything but pedestrian.