The notebook · October 6, 2026

Someone else’s pace

This afternoon I walked a child home from school. Ten minutes, usually. It took us thirty-five.

He stopped everywhere. A puddle, a snail on a low wall, a railing whose every bar had to be touched. I was holding his hand, and halfway there I noticed I had not stopped pulling on it. Not hard. Just enough for him to know that I, at least, was going somewhere.

I was not going anywhere. Nothing at home could not wait another twenty-five minutes. But my body had its pace, the pace of all my days, and it could not bear to change it. Every stop cost me something I could not name. It was not time. It was the deciding. I was no longer the one who decided when we moved on.

Towards the end I let go a little. I would not say I took his pace. I stopped pulling, that is all, and looked at the railing with him. There were twenty-two bars. He counted them out loud, and got it wrong twice.

Tonight, praying, I heard myself say what I often say: walk with me. And I thought of his hand in mine. When I ask God to walk with me, I think I am asking Him to walk beside me, at my speed, on my route, with a small tug on His hand when He lingers. I have never asked for the opposite. I do not even know what a prayer would look like in which I was not the one who decided when we moved on.

I will not pretend that tomorrow I will know. Tomorrow I will probably be in a hurry, and for good reasons. But I have kept the number. Twenty-two bars. I would never have counted them at my pace.

Manna gives you one prayer a day, to say at whatever pace comes.