It had to happen. At some point I would have to come back to walking, purely for its own sake. For exercise, for mind-shifting, for touching the planet, for getting out of my head, or back into it in a more meaningful way. For whatever reason mattered on any given day.
I talk about coming back to walking as if I had ever moved away from it. I hadn’t. Not really. But, also, maybe I had.
I had come to a place where I would more readily get on a bus when I could easily walk it. I had come to a place where I would walk because it was the only option, and no hardship, but not really think about the landscape or streetscape I was walking through. In that sense I had disconnected myself.
I still went for walks, but not so often.
Walking to get somewhere had stopped being the default option.
Certainly no longer hiking.
I had drifted.
Not unknowingly.
I kept trying to pull myself back in; I kept failing.
There was the ill-fated attempt to use a book of walks inherited from my Dad. It was an interesting challenge, and I did get to some places I otherwise wouldn’t have, but in the end the logistics made it more of a chore than an adventure. I’m too old to be adding chores into my life. I’m still young enough to want adventures. I’d somehow lost the plot on how to determine the one from the other at the ‘setting out’ stage.
There was the notion of going away at least once a month, even if only for one night. Every trip would involve some kind of walking, because it always does, but in the end that became exhausting. I think maybe the organising was more so than the doing, but also the planning ahead didn’t allow for the way my life was filling up with other loveliness.
Things that we set out to do because they might be fun, can also become chores if we over-commit to the principle of the thing: the notion that I am doing this because I said I would.
I did, for a couple of years, maybe three. Then I accepted three things: (1) it was exhausting, (2) I was doing it for the wrong reasons, and the unexpected third (3) the real reason I was doing it was not to go away every month, it was to reawaken my desire to travel wider. I was simply practising going away on my own again. I was out of the habit and wanted to get back into it.
On that score it worked, but it was also not a way to pull me back into walking, because the re-awakened desire to explore further afield came with the knowledge that I was never super-fit to begin with and I am now older. I want to get to places in a way that means I’m awake enough to enjoy them.
It may be that the walking and the travelling do not need to be so closely entwined.
Then I came to the books.
I still have all the walking guides that were originally intended as ‘to do’ lists.
I’m past all that. I’ve had my 1,000-mile challenge moment. The desire to go on Camino died in a period of overwhelm, and now doesn’t seem to matter either. I remember when Champing (Church camping) looked like it could be a thing.
All of it was simply my soul begging me to go walk again. Somewhere. Often. And trying to find reasons to do it. As if it needed any more justification than walking makes me happy. Putting one foot in front of the other for half a day or so soothes my soul.
For some reason I wasn't doing it the way I used to. I wasn't doing it the way some part of me wanted to. And I didn't know why.
Then one day, when asked to write about a remembered walk, I found I couldn’t dredge one, not a single specific walk out of a lifetime of wandering about on my shanks.
What I did come up with, was a random seven-minute reflection on ‘all the walks I don’t remember’.
There are so many of those.
A lot of them are captured in notebooks and photo albums (from pre-digital days).
I started thinking that it is time to remember them.
An insight I had as I started to ponder this idea was: I don’t remember does not mean the same thing as I can’t remember.
The memories are there if we actually try to access them, if we use the tools to open the doors of memory, the photographs, the notes, the souvenirs. I decided to revisit the walks I don’t remember, the ones I don’t devote recall-time to. I want to excavate them, bring them back into the light, review them from my new point of being. Because I can remember them when I choose to do so.
I have made a start on doing precisely that. Going back to the walking that I did – as a way of bringing me into the walking I am doing and the walking still to come. I have no idea whether this will work any better than any of the other attempts, but then life is just one experiment after another, so this is the latest one.
Another little insight was that it is one thing to recognise how many walks I don’t remember from way back when – but what about the ones I’m walking now? How much attention am I paying to these? Will I remember them?
And if not, will I have the photos and notes and poems organised in a way that will help me do so?
We will see. I will try.
As if I don’t have enough things that I am trying to do, there are these two parallel projects that have emerged from all of this. “All of the walks I don’t remember” is a deep dive into my personal archives – as much provoked by a desire to get rid of a stash of outdated guide books as it is by the desire to revisit those places. Alongside it I’m coming back to the mindful attention of current walking knowing that these are “All the walks I won’t remember.”
It was walking that first brought me to writing in anything like a serious way, so I guess it is fitting that it is writing that is taking me back to walking more seriously.
The ‘more seriously’ is an important qualifier. What actually brought me back to walking-walking is an App. I know. Sad. Sign of the times. It is an app that is counting daily steps for me, nagging me when I don’t do enough of them, stroking my ego when I do. What can I say? I don’t have a real, live person in my life to do that for me. Whatever works! Yes?
However, the app doesn’t care whether I walk around the block, or dance around my living room. It doesn’t care about the quality of my steps. On one level, if I’m honest, neither do I. I came to the programme through a desire to get fitter, lose unwanted poundage, work on the principle that energy begets energy and I’d rather be outside than in the gym. I’d rather be dancing than trudging a treadmill. But ultimately all it does is get me into my shoes and out the door, the rest of it…ah, that bit is where my writerly brain kicks in…the rest of it is where my poet self wants to wake up...
I’m doing the walking in order to walk, but given that is the case, what other juice can I squeeze out of it? Where can I find the beauty…what wisdom is waiting around the corner…where’s the poem waiting to be written? That’s what I mean by walking seriously.
Make me walk, and I’ll find a way to make the walk matter. Insight number three!
It’s not about putting one foot in front of the other. It’s about looking around the spaces those footsteps take me to. It’s about looking up – at the sky, into the branches of trees – it’s about looking down at what has fallen to the ground – spiky chestnut cases, golden leaves – it’s about looking straight ahead and finding a single leaf dangling in mid-air on a thread of spider-spin and connecting that to things happening elsewhere in my life.
I’m not going to lie, I get a kick out of hitting my step-target even when I’ve done it by walking to a dance class and doing the class and walking from there to the pool and home again, even when I’ve done it by walking into the city on a failed shopping trip, even when the last bits were dancing to Brucie in my kitchen. Every step counts.
The big “but” is that hitting the target is simply that. Exercise: tick! All well and good, and I will keep doing it for that reason alone. But (big ‘but’) the important thing is that it has brought me back into walking for the sake of the walk – for the discoveries along the way.
Today I wandered local streets, much taken by the leaf-litter and fallen lime-keys. I wandered into a patch of woodland. Twenty Acre Wood isn’t very old. It’s the remnants of the Sandy Plantation part of the Earlham estate, probably planted in the 18th century. It is now a Local Nature Reserve - the lowest level of protection we give to the most important fragments of our natural environment – but still something. Still a whisper to the local people who run here or walk their dogs, that maybe they
could treasure this place a little more.
Maybe I could, because this one isn’t a new discovery. I’ve walked here before. I’m sure I’ve written about it at crocus or snowdrop time. I don’t remember (!) any of the times I’ve walked it in October before. I know I have cycled along its edge, years ago. Decades. The days when Clive was living in Costessey and I was in the City and I would bike up to his on a Friday afternoon. I know I paid not a single drop of attention to any of it back then. Now, I try to give it more of its due.
I notice that someone has placed ‘green man’ carvings on some of the trunks. I notice leaf-shadow. I watch squirrel scurry. I feel the softness of the earth beneath my feet, the long years of needle-fall. I seek out half-walked pathways when a newly fallen trunk blocks my way.
I stop when I find a single leaf, halted in its fall by a single spider thread. I spend minutes unsuccessfully trying to photograph it. The young runner, black, beautiful, headphones on, barely pauses to wonder what I’m doing as he scoots off the path to give me space to do it…but over the road, he does pause and look back. I wanted him to come back and ask. He didn’t. I never did get the picture. I walked away in a different direction…down streets…through the familiar estates…to the shops…through the cemetery…home.
Another walk I won’t remember…
…except that there is a poem to be written, because of one leaf caught on a strand of gossamer, and a life that wasn’t.
