Why I started walking barefoot again
If we can understand ourselves, we will listen to others who are suffering and broken with compassion rather than contempt.
One day, when I was eight, I felt a sharpness pierce the bottom of my foot. I’d never experienced such pain before, and when I looked down, I saw a small puffy red mark and a beautiful dead honeybee crumpled in a patch of clovers. I can’t remember what my mom said to comfort me, but I can remember the pain, and that something changed in me that day—it was one of my last memories of being barefoot.
When I first met my partner, I was struck by the way he always took his shoes off at every park in the city. It felt like he was resisting the cardinal rule that being barefoot was reserved for swimming pools and warm days at the beach. I didn’t get it. Why was he taking off his shoes in grass that was straggly and perpetually covered in dog poo? I never bothered to ask him. On some level, I remembered how lovely it felt to take off my shoes and feel the earth, but instead of leaning into my curiosity, I only noticed the leaves and dirt that got trekked into the house, and later, the dirty soles of his feet when he climbed into bed.
Lately, I’ve been having trouble sleeping, an unresolved problem that manifested during the pandemic. With my heart pounding in my chest at night, I decided to research how to get a better night’s rest. Recently, I came across earthing, or grounding, a practice of standing on the earth barefoot or using an object/material that can help recreate the experience of being grounded by the earth.
Hearing the simplicity of this advice was a little irritating! But living in a rural place at this moment in my life makes being barefoot relatively easy, and so I began going barefoot at least once a day. I’ve found that walking barefoot drops me into a mindful state of being. My anxieties are released; I feel happier and more connected to everything around me—the dry pine needles, the crunchy grass, the twisted roots. WebMD explains that when we go barefoot, we connect to our planet's electrical charge and transfer electrons to our own body. If this is a little woo-woo for you, I understand. It is an interesting idea that seems to feel right in my body when I’m thinking about Earth’s energetic connection, even if it can’t be easily explained.
Right now, in a world that feels fraught and overflowing with suffering, I’m leaning into many questions—like, why I never bothered to ask my partner about his barefoot tendencies. Or would I have continued to walk barefoot if I hadn’t been stung as a child? Perhaps the most pressing one is: Why haven’t I created space for more curiosity when encountering someone different from me?
It has been a very long, exhausting week, and I am just now starting to process the election. I’ve been turning the news over in my mind, over and over in my heart, searching for words to sustain me in a moment when everything feels broken, with so much uncertainty, and no ground beneath my feet. What I can offer to anyone who is feeling disconnected from the outcome of this election are words from Thich Nhat Hanh, in his book, How To Fight:
“Interbeing is the idea that nothing exists separately from anything else. We are all interconnected. By taking care of another person, you take care of yourself. By taking care of yourself, you take care of the other person. Happiness and safety are not individual matters. If you suffer, I suffer. If you are not safe, I am not safe.”
At 3:46 a.m. on November 6th, I cried in my bed feeling the same pang of aloneness and deep grief I felt eight years ago. But something feels different this time. In the last election, I had so many conversations with people about the election. I poured over my Facebook feed, frantically trying to sway the opinions of undecided voters.
This time around, I’d only had a single intentional conversation with someone who had different views than my own. At this moment, living with the reality of the election results, it occurs to me that this is a very dangerous way of being—of keeping our suffering inside and not listening to one another.
Thich Nhat Hanh believes that we should listen to ourselves, so we can understand our fears and what makes us suffer. If we can understand ourselves, we will listen to others who are suffering and broken with compassion rather than contempt.
While I am both sad and fearful of what may come from Donald Trump’s reelection, I am even more afraid of living in a country where we place more faith in our preferred candidate than faith in one another.
How can we reach each other in our everyday lives? How can we stay curious through the fear? These are the beginning of my questions, and I hope they can become yours, too.