What the Most Profound Advice Taught Me About Running, Resistance, and the Life I Kept Refusing

Someone once gave me the most profound advice I have ever received. It took me years to take it. Not because it was complicat — it was simple, the way the truest things always are. The problem was readiness. The words were arriving long before I was shaping into someone capable of receiving them. I thanked the person warmly, filed the words away, and walked straight into the years of not-listening.

The question of advice — whether we take it, why we resist it, what it means when we finally do — sits at the centre of any examined life. This poem, The Words I Carried Back, moves slowly through that territory: through the running, the not-listening, the quiet accumulation of seasons, and the morning when everything finally shifts. Read it slowly. It was a writing to receive the same way advice always is — in your own time.

The Words I Carried Back

There was a woman once,
sitting in the way that certain people sit
when they are done with hurrying
her hands folded on the table,
her eyes looking somewhere past the window, past the street,
as if she could already see the shape of things
before they arrived.

She spoke slowly.
That was the first thing I noticed —
the way she did not rush the words,
as if she understood that language
could be offered too quickly
and land broken on the speed.

She said:
Stop running from the thing that is trying to teach you.

And I heard her
the way you hear a warning on a road you've never driven:
with half your attention on the sign
and the other half already past it.


I was twenty-three, perhaps twenty-four.
I carried the particular confidence of someone
who has not yet been truly wrong
who has lost small things
but not the things that hollow you
in the middle of the night
when the noise is gone
and only the truth remains.

I thanked her, warmly,
the way the young thank wisdom
with all the graciousness of someone
who has no intention of using it.

I folded her words the way you fold
a piece of paper you're not certain you'll need
and slipped them into the pocket
of a coat I almost never wore.


That was the beginning of the years I spent running.

Not the running of rivers, which know their destination
even in darkness —
but the running of someone
who cannot sit still long enough
to see what has followed them inside.

I moved between cities like a man changing the subject.
I changed work like someone who has not yet learned
that the problem travels in his own hands.
I loved people the way a storm loves the coast
arriving with tremendous force
and leaving the damage quietly,
withdrawing back into weather.

The advice waited.
Patient in the pocket of the coat.
Patient in the pause before sleep.
Patient in the face of a friend
who looked at me across a table one autumn evening
and said nothing
which was its own kind of saying.


There is a particular loneliness
in running from something you cannot name.

You explain it to yourself in borrowed languages:
you call it ambition,
you call it freedom,
you call it a refusal to settle.

But the body keeps its own ledger.
The body records what the mind is choosing to forget.

I would wake at three in the morning
and lie in the strange arithmetic of the dark
adding up everything I had moved away from,
arriving each time at a sum
I was not yet equipped to carry.

This is what no one tells you
about the most profound advice you receive
that you may carry it for years
before you understand it.

The gap between hearing and knowing
is not a failure of intelligence.
It is the distance wisdom travels
when it must cross a life before it lands.


The years wore me quietly.

Not with cruelty — life is not always cruel,
though we name it so when it corrects us.
It was more like water
finding the joints in stone:
not announcing itself,
not dramatic in any single motion,
but arriving every day
with the same unhurried persistence
until the stone begins to remember
what it always was beneath the hardness.

There was a morning
I cannot tell you which year exactly,
only that the light came through a window
I had not expected to still be standing in —
when I finally stopped.

Not in surrender.
In arrival.

The way a traveller stops who has been walking so long
that when he finally sits,
he understands that the sitting was the destination.
That the stillness was always where he was going.

I was quiet.
And in that quiet,
I heard her voice return across the years —

Stop running from the thing that is trying to teach you.


I understood it differently this time.

Not the way you understand a map when you are planning a journey,
but the way you understand a map
when you are already standing in the place it describes.

I understood that the thing I had been running from
was not a threat.
It was an invitation.
A room I had kept locked inside myself
because I was afraid of what I might find
if I finally walked in with a lamp
and looked clearly at what lived there.

The most profound advice I ever received
was not instruction.
It was prophecy —
a description of a country I had not yet entered,
spoken by someone who had already lived there
and come back.


I believe now that advice is a seed
planted in the wrong season.

Given in autumn
when nothing appears ready to grow.
Pressed into soil still too proud, too hard,
too certain of its own current composition
to make room for something new.

The seed does not mind.

The seed waits under everything —
under the years and the cities
and the relationships and the losses
and the slow patient accumulation of weather —
and waits until the conditions are right.
Until you are.

Then it opens.
Not because you commanded it.
Not because you finally remembered it was there.
But because growing was always what it was made to do.


I think about her often.

Whether she knew, when she spoke, that I wouldn't take it.
Whether she gave the words anyway
because she had once received them
from someone sitting the same way,
with the same folded hands,
the same eyes looking past the window
into the shape of a life they had already walked through.

There is something in this
I cannot approach without coming close to weeping.

To give someone words they are not yet ready for —
that is an act of extraordinary love.
A faith in the future of a person
the person themselves has not yet arrived at.

To say: I see the version of you on the other side of this.
I do not know when you will reach them.
But I am leaving this here for when you do.


I am older now than she was then.

I notice I am beginning to sit the way she sat —
still, hands folded, watching the young
move through their beautiful, costly momentum,
and feeling the words form quietly in the chest.

I am careful.

I have learned that advice given badly is not just useless — it closes.
The ear that hears judgment where care was intended
will not open again easily.

And so I wait for the moment to open itself.
I offer when offering is invited.
And I accept — with a gratitude I did not ask for —
that the words may not land for years.

That they will travel in a pocket
of a coat someone almost never wears.

That this is not failure.
This is the only way wisdom has ever moved —
person to person, season to season,
across the unbridgeable and somehow bridged distance
between one life and another.


So when I am asked —
what is the most profound advice you received,
and did you take it —

I say: I took it.

Late, and slowly,
and not in the way it was given,
but with everything the years had made of me.

I took it the way the earth takes rain —
not on command,
not all at once,
but completely.

Until there was no longer any separation
between the water
and the ground.

The most profound advice we receive rarely feels profound when it arrives. It comes too simply, from someone too familiar, at a moment when we are too confident or too afraid to hear it clearly. This poem attempts to sit with that — with the gap between wisdom given and wisdom received, which is not a moral failure but a human one. The detour teaches what the shortcut cannot. Sometimes the only path to understanding is through the years that refuse it.

If you are reading this and carrying advice you haven’t taken yet — perhaps you are still in the carrying. The seed is already in the soil. Some seeds take longer, and the life they eventually produce is no less extraordinary for the wait. The question this poem finally asks isn’t whether you took the advice on time. It asks whether, when the moment comes, you take it wholly — the way the earth takes rain. Not on command, not all at once, but completely.