The in-between is crowded

Before the walk starts, I try not to count the people.

Not because the number doesn't matter. It does, eventually, for things like logistics and group splits and whether we need two circles or three.

But if I count too early, I start doing math in my head instead of paying attention to what's actually in front of me.

And what's in front of me, every Saturday, is always more interesting than a number.

So I just watch. I shake hands. I learn names I'll probably forget by mile two. I notice who stands at the edge of the group and who walks straight into the middle like they've been here a hundred times, even if it's their first.

A few weeks ago, before a walk in Austin, I noticed something I hadn't been able to name yet.

It started with a simple comment.

One of the walkers — someone new, first week at a new company — described his situation to me while we were still in the parking lot.

He said it felt like a burning building. He meant the new job. The chaos, the understaffing, the being-thrown-in-without-a-net. He laughed when he said it.

But underneath the laugh was something he wasn't quite saying, which was: I don't know if I made the right call.

I filed that away.

We got into the opening circle. People went around sharing their names, their gratitude, and the topic they were bringing to the trail.

The topics on any given Saturday can be funny, deep, mundane, philosophical. Sometimes all four in the same circle. But that morning, I kept hearing a particular kind of question. Not the words exactly... the feeling underneath them.

A woman said she was on sabbatical. She'd been able to spend time with family, which felt meaningful. Her question for the group: how do we keep our humanity central in this age of AI?

A man introduced himself as visiting from Denver. Moving to Austin in three months. He said he wanted to talk about home — what home actually is, what goes into it — and then, almost like he caught himself saying too much too fast, added: identity transformation. Becoming the best version of yourself. He was grateful for the bird that woke him up at 6:05 that morning.

A woman who'd come from New York — who'd left tech to write and make films — said she'd just finished her first short film. She'd submitted it everywhere. And she'd gotten nothing back but rejections. Heartbreaking was the word she used. The question she brought: How do you keep going when everything is telling you to stop?

I looked around the circle. Maybe forty people. And I thought: how many of these folks are in the middle of something?

Not a crisis or a breakdown. Just... between.

I've hosted a lot of these walks.

I've been on the trail when someone realizes mid-sentence that they need to leave a relationship. I've walked next to people who are rebuilding after losing a job, a marriage, a version of themselves they'd been carrying for twenty years.

But that morning hit differently, because I wasn't just witnessing one person in the in-between.

I was witnessing everyone.

Later on the trail, past the point where the path opens up and the city gets quieter, I found myself in a conversation with a woman who had been in what she described as a marriage that wasn't good for a very long time. She didn't dramatize it.

She just said: I made myself smaller and smaller and smaller. And I forgot who I was.

She said she wasn't sure she had a choice anymore. That leaving had started to feel like the only thing left to do, not a decision so much as an exhale. She'd been slowly reclaiming herself ever since.

She said the first time she'd tried something like this walk, she'd given herself five minutes. "Stay five minutes, talk to one person, and if you hate it, go." 

One person anchored her. She stayed.

I thought about the Denver man in the opening circle, the bird at 6:05, the question about home.

I thought about the woman on sabbatical, asking how to stay human.

I thought about the filmmaker, asking how you keep going despite rejection.

And I thought about the guy in the parking lot, describing his burning building of a new job with a laugh that was half-genuine and half-cover.

Here's what I've come to understand about the walk: it doesn't solve anything.

That's not a knock on it. That's actually what makes it work.

It's not therapy. It's not a seminar. Nobody's going to hand you a framework for the chapter you're in the middle of.

What the trail does is something simpler and, in my experience, rarer:

It gives you two and a half hours in which your current chapter is allowed to exist without apology. You can say I'm in-between and have that be the whole answer. You don't have to know what comes next to be welcome here.

The woman who forgot herself didn't figure anything out on the trail. She just said it out loud, and someone said amen, and they kept walking.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

The filmmaker didn't get a breakthrough on how to handle rejection. But she asked the question out loud to a circle of forty strangers, and at least a dozen of them felt it in their chests like she was asking it for them, too.

The man from Denver is going to move to Austin in August. He's going to find out what home means when you build it on purpose, later in life, with intention. I hope he comes back to the walk when he does.

I try not to count the people before the walk starts.

But afterward, walking back to the parking lot, I always find myself thinking about all the different lives that just spent two and a half hours in the same space.

The same mile markers, the same foggy Austin morning, the same trail going in and going back.

People in new cities. People in new jobs. People leaving things behind. People not yet sure what they're moving toward. People who showed up for the bird and the community and the questions they've been carrying for months.

What strikes me every single time is that none of them knew they were all in the same story.

They came for a walk. They went home a little less alone in whatever they're carrying.

Receive More Stories Like This

Cameron Hogan is the co-founder of The Board and host of The Board Walks in Austin, Texas.