At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel left his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and began a 4,000-mile walk across America, carrying an audio recorder, a “Walking to Listen” sign, and an open mind ready for conversations with strangers. His book, Walking to Listen, documents his year-long trek across America to learn the art of listening.
Q. In 2011, you set out on a cross-country walk with a mission of listening to strangers. Most people walk for adventure, for spiritual reasons, or to work through some healing process. But you chose to walk to listen. What made walking and listening the right combination for you?
School, in my culture, is kind of the best thing we’ve got when it comes to a rite of passage, and so when I completed that rite of passage by graduating from college, but still felt uninitiated, I didn’t know what to do. I had so many questions that I couldn’t ignore, basic questions like, “What does it mean to actually become an adult?” and “How do I live a meaningful life that doesn’t revolve around money or status or career?” and “What actually matters?” School made it so that I didn’t have to ask myself certain questions. “Who are you?” A student. “What do you do?” School. But once I graduated, a frightening unknown came in, and rather than run away from it, I decided to walk right toward it.
I decided I wanted to try walking across America because it would give me a simple container within which to ask these complex questions. And I wanted to challenge myself, see how strong I was, how far I could walk, how much solitude I could bear.
I was searching for my own vulnerability, which is the flip side of any feat of endurance or strength: it’s a courtship with your own vulnerability, your mortality, the fact that you are not in control of the universe, and that you will die, and so best learn how to walk with respect and care. This is what a true initiation teaches you. Or that’s what mine taught me.
And as important as walking was for my learning, listening felt like the way to the teachings. Listening deeply, trustworthily: to others, to myself, to the land, to the moment. I was learning how to listen, how to be sensitive enough and attuned enough to really “be with,” which is how I would define listening. To listen is to be with.
Q. Ernest Hemingway once said, “When People Talk, Listen Completely. Most People Never Listen.” Listening is one of the hardest soft skills. You were only 23 when you had that mission in mind. How did you train yourself to really listen, instead of hearing?
For me, learning how to listen was a matter of survival on my walk. I would get hungry out in my solitude, hungry from companionship. I didn’t listen to any content on the road, no earbuds, no headphones, just the winds, the cars, my own mind.
So after hours and hours, I was famished for human connection and all I wanted to do was listen to someone, anyone other than my own head. We forget how much we need each other, rely on each other.
Out there on the road, it became obvious to me. I depend on everyone I meet. Maybe for directions. Maybe for a place to pitch my tent. Or maybe just to swap a few words with. Even that is a nourishment. We are gifts to one another, if only we know how to receive the gifts of others and give the gift of ourselves.
It takes mindfulness to do that, awareness that it is a privilege to be with people. Every. Person. And then courage, to risk asking them a question. And presence, to be with them enough that they can feel that you care.
Q. How did you plan your walking route? Did you plan your route mainly to get to your endpoint, or was it more about the people you hoped to meet along the way?
I had the intention to walk until I ran out of money, reached the ocean, or just wanted to be done with it. I started outside Philadelphia on October 14, 2011 and went south because it was getting cold.
I didn’t carry a smartphone, but I did have a flip phone and a small laptop. I’d find wifi once every few days and plan out the details of my route on Google Maps, trying to avoid major highways and sometimes making changes based on who I met. But in general, my direction was south-southwest, then west-northwest.
Q. I recently read about the idea called land snorkeling—it is about how you explore a place slowly and intentionally, really taking the time to notice and appreciate your surroundings. When you were on your walk, did you notice a difference in what you could see, or experience compared to other forms of travel?
Definitely. I was amazed at how much more I was able to see walking. It wasn’t until I was walking on the road that I realized just how isolating and insulated our cars are.
They cut us off from the land, the elements, the other beings of the world, each other. And we live with that every day. Walking, I felt much more connected to everything and everyone. Which isn’t always convenient.
It’s not comfortable to feel connected to the rain. You get soaked! And what about strangers? My walk was about taking the risk to find out about what connects us when we take the time to ask, “Who are you?”
Q. I understand you packed an audio recorder and a “Walking to Listen” sign. Were people usually coming up to you, or did you have to start the conversations yourself? And if so, how did you decide who to talk to?
Some people would pull over and talk with me, but mostly I was coming up to them: coming into the diner for a break, or the gas station, or looking for a place to pitch my tent at the church, the fire station, the alligator ranch, the mariachi radio station.
The walk was the world’s best conversation starter, an ice breaker. It cut through our entrenched fears and suspicions of each other, the prejudices and projections we put on each other, our assumptions and judgements and stories, and suddenly it would be just us: this kid who’s apparently walking across America and the person who is path he just came across.
And when people found out I was walking to listen to them, to their stories, many of them took that as a beautiful offering and took me up on the offer to listen. Listening is so rare in our world that when someone shows up who’s actually capable of deep listening, a lot starts to come out.
Q. Are there any unforgettable stories from strangers you met on your walk that still stay with you today?
There were many. I wrote my book, Walking to Listen, in order to honor those stories and pass them on. I got to hear about what it was like to grow up in Selma in the 1960s and walk in the civil rights marches there. I got to hear about what it’s like to become a widow in your twenties after your combat veteran husband takes his own life. I got to hear about what it was like growing up on the Diné/Navajo reservation and be expected to join the boarding schools that were designed to eradicate Indigenous cultures. I got to hear about what it’s like to be a mother of ten. Countless treasures. We all have them.
Q. Listening was a big part of your walk, but did spending a whole year on foot teach you anything new about travel?
The walking embodied my traveling, gave me a sense of what it feels like to provide the physical energy required to move through space. The walking was my payment, an investment in my relationship with the earth. It was a kind of quiet declaration: “I want to know you. I want to experience you. I want to know and experience myself.” No matter how dirty I get, or uncomfortable, or afraid and vulnerable, I want to be there for it. For you. For myself. The walking taught me about the power of vulnerability, of exposure. There is so much to be learned simply from slowing down. And walking is just one way to enter into the present moment.
Q. Looking back on that one-year walk, and to your current roles as an author, coach, facilitator, and speaker, how do you think your listening skills, ability to interpret, and empathy have changed since then?
My walk was a year-long masterclass in presence. How to slip past my own defenses, my own projections and stories and fears, and enter into the present moment with someone, to meet them as they are, and to include all of myself in that presence, too.
To really be here. That learning has become the foundation of all the work that I do now in schools, with my clients, and in my personal life as well. To really, fully be here now. To listen sensitively. To seek understanding of self and other. The walk gave me a glimpse of the surprising, healing, and magnificent world that becomes available to us when we are willing to share our true selves with one another.
Once you get a glimpse of that world, you can’t unsee it. That year-long glimpse is what gives me the conviction to continue seeking and creating that world with others now, in so-called “normal life.”
Q. In your book Walking to Listen: A Memoir, what do you hope readers take away about travel, human connection, or the practice of walking slowly through life?
I hope the book provides readers with the inspiration to listen a little more deeply to their own hearts, to the land, and to any and all beings they encounter of the course of a given day. It is a privilege to be, and to be with others is a gift. I believe our world will begin to transform once we start becoming trustworthy of one another’s stories. The true stories that break us open and transform us are the stories of healing we need to hear that will forge the way.
Q. If you could add a single “hidden chapter” to Walking to Listen, what story would you tell?
I spent three years writing the book full-time, turning over every stone of my experience and getting all the stories into that book. They are all in there.
All photographs credit: Andrew Forsthoefel
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