For most of my life, I thought of cairns as something you encountered outdoors: a small stack of stones, a marker, a quiet indication that someone had passed this way before.

Living in Asheville, surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains, that image feels especially natural to me. Trails, ridgelines, overlooks, switchbacks — those moments when the path becomes a little less obvious and some small marker helps you get your bearings again.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that most of the cairns in my own life weren’t found on mountain trails at all.

They showed up in classrooms and conference rooms, in places I never expected to live, in relationships, in loss, in mistakes I would have preferred not to make, and in ordinary moments I might easily have hurried past without noticing.

My life has taken me through a lot of places and a lot of different kinds of work. I grew up in Waycross, went to Florida State, built a career that eventually took me from Jacksonville to Chicago, Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale, Bermuda, Palm Springs, Cape Cod, Ponte Vedra Beach, and now back to Asheville. Along the way, I’ve worked with and taught professionals for more than thirty years, taught scuba diving, traveled to places like Bhutan, Greece, and Thailand, changed directions more than once, loved deeply, grieved deeply, and reconsidered more than a few things I once thought I understood.

None of that has left me with all the answers. If anything, the opposite has happened. The older I get, the more interested I seem to be in the questions.

What actually matters? What do we keep carrying simply because we’ve carried it for a long time? What does success mean after we’ve achieved some of the things we once thought would define it? How do we begin again without pretending the chapters that came before didn’t happen? How do grief and joy manage to live in the same life? How do we recognize when something we once believed no longer fits?

And maybe most of all, how much of life do we miss because we’re moving too quickly to notice what is happening while it’s happening?

Those are the kinds of questions I want to explore here.

A cairn, as I’m using the word, is a waymarker. It doesn’t tell another traveler where they must go. It simply offers a bit of orientation and says, in effect, someone has been here before.

That idea matters to me because I don’t want to write from the end of the trail, pretending I’ve figured out the route. I haven’t. I’m still walking it.

The story is the stone. What I recognize in the story becomes the cairn. Whether it offers anything useful to another traveler is theirs to decide.

So some pieces may begin with an experience from Arthur Andersen or from decades of teaching. Others may begin on a dive boat, in another country, on an actual mountain trail, around a dinner table, in a relationship, or in a memory I didn’t expect to revisit.

The settings will change, but the question underneath them will usually be the same:

Is there something here another traveler might recognize in their own life?

That is what I want Cairns to be: not a collection of instructions or a catalog of answers, and certainly not evidence that I have mastered the art of living, but stories, reflections, questions, and occasional markers left along the way.

I’ll publish two substantial Cairns each month, with shorter Trail Notes in between — observations, questions, photographs, bits of language, and moments that seem worth noticing before they disappear.

If something here helps you pause, see something differently, recognize yourself, or ask a better question of your own life, then the Cairn has done its work.

I’m glad you’re here. Let’s see what we find along the way.

Christopher

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