What We Carry: Lessons from the Bridge

Last week, nestled in the verdant embrace of Hocking Hills, I gathered with five of my most trusted confidants for a retreat that would shift something fundamental within me.

On our final day together, my dear friend Cherylanne Skolnicki—a woman whose presence alone commands both awe and reverence—guided us through her visioning and goal-setting workshop. She began with a guided meditation that would become one of the most transformative experiences of my life.

As the meditation unfolded, she led us to a bridge and asked us to examine the contents of a backpack we'd been carrying. When I looked inside mine, I discovered it was filled with rocks. Not metaphorical stones, but rocks—a Mary Poppins bag impossibly brimming with them. In that moment of clarity, I knew instantly what they represented: every self-sabotaging belief, every whisper of doubt, every limitation I had accepted as truth.

And I was livid.

Not at myself, exactly, but at the realization that I had been lugging this unnecessary weight through every twist and turn of my journey. These weren't precious gems or meaningful souvenirs—they were useless burdens I had somehow decided were mine to bear.

I began lifting out the heaviest rocks one by one, examining them briefly before setting them down. But as I reached the smaller stones, a wave of impatience washed over me. I didn't need to catalog every single doubt that had ever weighed me down. So I turned that backpack upside down and shook it with all my might, watching as the remaining rocks tumbled out and scattered.

The liberation in that moment was electric.

Later in the meditation, we approached a fork in the road reminiscent of the one in Beauty and the Beast—one path bathed in light, alive with birdsong and dancing butterflies, the other shrouded in mystery and shadow. Beside this divergence sat a box, waiting to be opened.

My first instinct was to choose the sunlit path. Isn't that what we're taught? Follow the light, avoid the darkness?

But when I opened the box, it contained a luminous, pulsing light. As I held it to my chest, it spread through me until I was glowing from within. And in that moment, I understood—I was meant for the mysterious path, not because it was harder, but because I had become my own light, my own sun. I no longer needed to seek illumination elsewhere.

Since that day on the bridge, something has fundamentally shifted. I move through the world differently—with a calmness that has my wife tilting her head in curious observation, with a confidence in my knowing that feels both foreign and deeply familiar. It's as though the person I was always meant to be was hidden beneath those rocks, waiting to emerge.

I share this with you not as a neat parable with a tidy moral, but as an invitation:

What's in your backpack? What stones have you been carrying that serve no purpose except to weigh you down? What might happen if you simply turned that pack upside down and shook it empty?

And what light might you find waiting for you once those burdens are gone? What path might call to you when you recognize the illumination you carry within?

The journey doesn't demand that we know every twist in the road ahead. It only asks that we trust ourselves to navigate whatever comes, carrying only what serves us, and allowing our inner light to guide the way.