The flagstones we walked over each morning in college were old and worn—meant to look like the kind you might find in some old European city like Prague, Tuscany, the Alsace region of France, or parts of Belgium. Mind you, I haven’t actually been to any of those places. But I can Google cobblestone streets with the best of them. And I did see Beauty and the Beast. Twice.

Those old paths—the ones that look ancient even when they’re not—have always struck me as part stagecraft, part memory. At my college, some of the original buildings dated back to the 1700s, but most were Depression-era constructions, built in the 1930s when money was cheap—if you had any. They were designed to look older, to suggest permanence, tradition, a kind of storybook scholarliness. Think Harry Potter or a viewbook trying a little too hard.

These architectural decisions weren’t just aesthetic. They told a story: of continuity, of learning as an ancient pursuit. Good stories are always looking for a new audience.

So, picture two people walking across one of those old quads—any of the many nested courtyards on a campus trying to conjure up Oxford, or at least a summer in Vermont. They pass each other. Maybe they nod. Maybe they speak.

Let’s say they do speak. And let’s say one of them is me, back in college.

“How you doing?”

Not quite a Joey Tribbiani impersonation, and not New York—more Chicago, my native tongue.

I probably said it fifty, maybe a hundred times a week. Dozens of times a day. It wasn’t grammatically correct. And I wasn’t always listening for an answer.

Here’s where David Foster Wallace comes in—because I’ve been thinking about him again. He once wrote about how the sublime can live in the mundane. The way we move through our days in a default state, on autopilot. Until, one day, someone calls us out.

“Do you even care?”

That question stopped me in my tracks. Did I?

If I were being honest, I would have said, “No, not really.” But I did the cover-up instead: “Of course, I do!” Maybe I even paused to look at them—really look. Maybe I didn’t.

But that moment stuck.

It made me wonder about all the other things I say or do without thinking. The ways we operate on repeat. The casual scripts. The old pathways we walk—real or metaphorical—without noticing where they lead, or how we got there.

The times in life when we are most real, most alive, are often the times when something interrupts the script. We take a different route. We notice something new. We brush our teeth with the other hand. We look someone in the eye when we normally wouldn’t.

Some people call that mindfulness. I just think it’s paying attention. And maybe having a little more compassion—for ourselves and for others.

Because here’s the thing: even the cobblestones were laid by someone. Someone bent over in the sun, chiseling, shaping, laying them down one by one. Imagine carving your name into the underside of a stone that millions would walk over for centuries. What would it say?

Some of those old buildings have hidden jokes carved into them. Little secrets left behind. A smile tucked into the stonework, waiting to be seen.

So maybe, if this post was about nothing at all, it’s really about that: paying a little more attention. Asking questions like you mean them. Saying goodbye like you know it matters.

Because the truth is, we’re always walking on the work of others. We might as well notice the stones.

Curated Listening:

At a graduation I attended this past week, one of the students quoted Green Day. It reminded me of that pause we all take at the end of a season—the moment where the mundane becomes something else. A little goodbye, a little blessing. Listen to Green Day’s “Good Riddance” HERE.

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