Jill Thomas is a Rambler, traveler, and storyteller with a big laugh who believes life takes her where she needs to go, no matter the roundabout path.
This week I had the lovely, somewhat rare chance to Ramble alone with Lorraine, my business partner and the head of our Rambler Care Crew. She answers an astonishing number of emails and messages, helps oversee our Sole Circles, and gently untangles the occasional human knot that comes with bringing tens of thousands of women together.
Lorraine lives over on the big island—Vancouver Island—beside the little one I live on—Salt Spring—so she rode the ferry over for a meeting. Her job has grown enormously recently, and we were going to talk about how we could make it more manageable. But it was far too beautiful outside to sit inside. The sky was blue, the forest was a hundred shades of green, and the late-afternoon light was casting long shadows through the trees.
Somewhere along the trail, Lorraine told me about a woman who had recently emailed Rambler Care with a question before joining a Ramble. She wanted to know whether we could guarantee there would be absolutely no small talk happening if she signed up for a Ramble. We cracked up.
Lorraine had replied, kindly, that while Sole Sisters are generally a friendly bunch, guaranteeing the complete absence of small talk among a group of women might be beyond our organizational capabilities. We can moderate hundreds of Sole Circles but ensuring nobody says, “Lovely weather we're having,” may be where our powers end.
Except the more we talked about it, the less funny—or at least the less only funny—this idea seemed.
Our Rambler Care team often hears from women who tell us they are neurodivergent, have ADHD, are autistic, highly sensitive, or socially anxious. Often they explain this when they are asking us how a Sole Circle works or whether they will fit in.
I don't know whether women with brains that work a little differently are disproportionately drawn to Sole Sister Ramblers, or whether women at this stage of life are simply more willing to tell the truth about what makes them comfortable and what doesn't. Maybe after 45, 55, 65 or 75 years of trying to fit ourselves into other people's boxes, some of us are finally saying: Here is how I actually work.
And suddenly I thought Lorraine's email might have given us a terrific idea.
What if we helped this woman organize a No Small Talk Ramble?
Weather talk could be strictly prohibited. Nobody could ask what you do for work, where you're from, or how old your children are. There would be no requirement to pretend to care about a stranger's kitchen renovation. Instead, perhaps you would be required to begin with your greatest fear, your weirdest hobby, the book that changed your life or whether you believe consciousness exists outside the human brain.
I would go.
I have never been diagnosed as neurodivergent and, at this point in my life, I don't have much interest in collecting labels for myself. But I suspect some of the people who know me well would not fall off their chairs if it turned out my brain operates a little outside the middle lane.
I find small talk exhausting. It isn't because I don't like people. It is almost the opposite: I want to get to the interesting part. What keeps you awake at night? What broke your heart? What are you still dreaming about doing? What happened to you when you were twelve that you now realize shaped half your life?
Sole Circles are how our community connects locally for in-person Rambles, and we have hundreds of them around the world. Perhaps a Sole Circle is the perfect place to organize a Ramble that suits exactly what one person likes to do?.
We tend to describe Sole Circles as local walking and activity groups for women 45+, which is accurate but doesn't really explain them. A Sole Circle is more like a big, ongoing experiment in finding your people.
We create the container. We find women who live reasonably close to one another, bring them together, support Ramble Organizers, and do our best to keep the wheels from falling off. But the Ramblers decide what happens inside it.
There are as many ways to Ramble as there are Ramblers. We define Rambling as a mindset of play, purpose and presence that gets us moving, exploring, creating and connecting. Our Ramblers hike, swim, cycle, paddle and play pickleball, but they also wander markets, go to concerts, organize craft marathons and pub lunches.
That’s the magic of a Sole Circle. Everyone doesn’t want the same thing— but gather enough women together and chances are someone else wants to do the same peculiar, wonderful thing you do.
I was reminded of this myself recently. Living on Salt Spring Island means there is a ferry boat between me and my closest Sole Circle on Vancouver Island, so despite spending the last five years helping build Sole Sister Ramblers, I don't actually Ramble with Sole Sisters as much as I would like because going over usually turns into a full-day production. But recently I managed two Rambles in two days—a lunch one day and a walk followed by a pub lunch in Nanaimo the next—and both times I came home thinking, Why don't I do this more often?
What I noticed wasn't that I had suddenly acquired a dozen new best friends. It was quieter than that. I had met some of these women several times over the years, and their faces and stories were becoming familiar. The awkwardness was fading and, the more I showed up, the easier, warmer and more fun it felt.
And I realized again that this is how friendship often happens. Not through some cinematic moment when two strangers lock eyes across a forest trail and instantly recognize their soulmate, but by seeing the same person again. And then again. You walk beside her for a while. You learn something about her. Next time you pick up the conversation.
Which made me think again about the woman who hates small talk. Maybe she doesn't dislike people at all. Maybe she desperately wants people but hates the particular ritual we have invented for starting friendships. And maybe somewhere in her Sole Circle are four other women sitting at home thinking exactly the same thing.
I think we sometimes misunderstand inclusion. We imagine it means making every Ramble broad enough that everybody will want to come, when perhaps real inclusion sometimes means doing exactly the opposite. Get specific.
One of our Ranglers recently organized a Ramble that she described as steep, long, difficult, and challenging. Sixteen women initially signed up; however, once everyone understood exactly what was involved, twelve decided to cancel, leaving only four women on the Ramble. The organizer was initially disappointed. Only four.
I think four is perfect. Those four women found each other—four women who love climbing steep hills and now have some new hiking companions. Nobody failed. Nobody was excluded. The Ramble did exactly what it was supposed to do: connected women who wanted the same kind of adventure.
The Ramble organizer later told us that she now hikes with these four women every week. She was so grateful to have found friends who still enjoyed hard hikes because her longtime hiking companions no longer did. There was nothing wrong with them and nothing wrong with her; they had simply changed in different directions, as people do. She still wanted to climb mountains, so she needed to find some new people who wanted to climb them too.
That may be one of the stranger things about this stage of life. We are becoming more ourselves at exactly the same time that finding people who fit who we have become gets harder.
By now, many of us know what we like. We know which shoes hurt our feet and which people exhaust us. We know whether we want to spend Saturday climbing a mountain drinking coffee and discussing Jane Austen. And we know that our bucket list doesn’t come with unlimited extensions.
At the same time, our minds and bodies are becoming more particular. Some women are navigating anxiety, ADHD, or autism. Others are carrying grief, caregiving responsibilities, menopause, arthritis, injuries, loneliness, financial worries, or changing mobility.
Some can still hike twenty kilometres and want companions who can keep up. Some can manage two kilometres and worry terribly that everyone else will have to slow down for them. Some need frequent bathroom stops. Some need quiet. Some need a lot of encouragement before they'll walk into a group of strangers.
Eventually, if we are lucky enough to keep getting older, all of us will have to renegotiate things—our knees, our energy, our confidence, our hearing, our balance, our expectations. That isn't failure. That's aging. And I increasingly think the answer isn't to hide those peculiarities in an effort to fit in, but to put them front and centre in the Ramble description.
So organize the No Small Talk Ramble and the Slow Your Roll Ramble for women who worry they can't keep up. Organize the Mountain Scramble Ramble for women who want their calves to hurt the next morning.
Organize the Frequent Peeing Ramble, the Jane Austen Ramble, the Stop and Pet Every Cat Ramble, the Walk Ten Steps and Take Another Photo Ramble, or the Absolutely No Hills Under Any Circumstances Ramble. Organize a two-kilometre Ramble because five hurts, or a twenty-kilometre one because five isn't nearly enough.
However you want to Ramble, organize that.
It is vulnerable, of course, to announce the particular thing you want and then wait to see if anybody else wants it too. Maybe nobody will sign up the first time. Maybe only four women do—and they turn out to be exactly the four women you’ve been hoping to find.
Because a Sole Circle doesn't work because every woman belongs on every Ramble. It works when enough different women are brave enough to create the Rambles they actually want, until eventually another woman—perhaps one who has been sitting at home feeling lonely, worrying that she is too slow, too anxious, too intense, too quiet, too old, too weird, or simply terrible at small talk—sees one and thinks:
Oh. There you are.
READ MORE > JT's Tales From The Trail, Rambler Cafe Blog
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