Many of you know the axiom that goes something like this, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
This is about as true as , “if you have one crumb of cheese, then you have the start of some nachos.”
It is a dangerous cliche. Yes, it is “true” but first ask yourself before you step one thousand miles: Do you really need to go that far? How about The Grand Canyon? You haven’t been there yet and it’s only an hour away. Take a bus across town- there’s that Ukranian restaurant that you’ve heard about. After all, as the Yugoslavian mail carriers say, “one thousand miles away, people still cough.”
1000 miles is a long haul. I once trudged through 1,238 miles of tundra because my brother Tenzin married the daughter of an Inuit Chief, and in those poor college days, I had not money for sled dogs. It resulted in frostbite and hypothermic madness but the taste of wood roasted seal fat makes me soon forget this. To this day, I vomit when I see snow.
So go on your great journey if you like, but think first of this. The spot where you stand on is itself the very end of a 1000 mile journey.
Alert!
great zamboni 
Today I stand at a spot that took me 1000 miles to reach, or, in another measure, sixty nine years. I have a question for the great Zamboni: is it permissable, however mildly, and with whatever ambivalence, to rage at the miles and years it takes to reach a destination? Is it unfair to resent the distance and time necessary to reach the place we want to be, even if we do not know in advance that the place is actually there? What about the 1000 miles that were never mapped so could not be calculated? How does a travel agent help us reach a place that is not on any list of destinations?
It will take the minions of Zamboni 38 hours to ejducicate this question of profoundity into answerable units -patience!