05/09/2025
We play a strange game with ourselves every single day. When the pack straps dig into our shoulders, when the sun beats down and the road stretches for miles without shade, when the temptation to stop is loud enough to drown out every thought, we focus only on what’s possible. If we tell ourselves, this is too far, too heavy, too much—it becomes true, and we collapse beneath a self fulfilling prophecy. But if we envision the ideal—bodies capable of the miles, minds capable of figuring out how to walk the country, willpower capable of overcoming it all—we find a strength that we won’t arrive at any other way. Nothing external has changed. Our bodies haven’t magically lightened. What changes is the limit we’re willing to accept.
That is the real secret of walking America: people avoid it because of what they believe is possible for themselves. And more specifically, what they believe they are possible of acclimating to or finding contentment with.
This truth goes far beyond walking. In matters of judgment, openness, love, relationships, purity, mindfulness, or enlightenment, the same rule applies. If you expect to be limited, you will be limited. Convince yourself that you’ll never master your anger, never quiet your thoughts, never reach peace, never experience the divine, and you will manufacture that fate. The ceiling is fixed because you fixed it.
But the opposite is also true: the only way to rise to what’s truly possible is to deny what might be impossible. Some will think that’s empty optimism, but in reality it’s how the human mind works.
This is wonderfully expressed in the placebo effect. People swallow sugar pills and heal because they believe they’re being healed. Patients undergo sham surgeries and experience real relief because their minds accept the story. Belief goes so far as to rewire pain, hormones, and even immune responses. The body itself is manipulated by expectation.
If belief can change flesh and bone, how much more can it shape thought and spirit?
Consider the way we speak about our own minds. I’m an angry, anxious, or shy person. I’m too adhd. My attention span is too short. I’m not a good meditator. I can’t quiet my thoughts. These assumptions become iron bars. But if we entertain another premise—I can train my thoughts; I can redirect my anger; I can grow attention like a muscle—the door cracks open as we turn the key of belief.
Mastery doesn’t come instantly, of course. But without the belief that control is possible, control will never arrive.
Walking America has been our laboratory for this truth. Again and again, we’ve discovered that expectation is more decisive than terrain, weather, or circumstance. So when it feels impossible, we turn inward: what am I saying to myself?
Although a kind of self deception, it is only through this practice that we can reach for what’s really possible. Reality itself is never as limited as it seems. The placebo effect proves it. The resilience of the human mind proves it. Airplanes and submarines and space ships prove it. The internet and AI prove it. And our own miles—over deserts, mountains, highways, and forgotten backroads—prove it.
Depending on how you play the game of expected limitations, you might lose before you begin. If you dare to imagine the ideal—even when it feels like fiction—you step into potential far greater than what you otherwise think you can bear.
