I've always walked. We walked to school. We walked to the shops. My greatest connection to my Dad was forged through walking in the hills. Whenever I lost my way, I would go for a walk. When I started to travel to further-away places, I went on walking holidays. When I was truly lost, I got out a map of the city and noted all the green spaces and set myself the challenge of visitingthem all. On foot, from home. Somewhere along the line I took up the challenge of walking a thousand miles in a year, and wove some complex rules around what that meant for me.
That challenge worked in the short term, it got me out the door on days when I didn't want to go. It brough my attention back to my intention by making me add up the inconsequential miles. The problem with meeting a challenge is the problem with all goals and targets…it becomes about the target and loses sight of the purpose.
My purpose in walking, I thought at the time, was about getting the exercise done, sorting out the body that I had fallen out of love with because I didn't like how she was looking. Needless to say it didn't work. I didn't have a strong enough 'why' to get fitter and healthier – indeed I had stronger reasons not to, and in the process I was press-ganging a pleasure into service of a pointless aspiration. Intention and attention can only take you so far if the aspiration isn't grounded in inspiration.
I walked. I counted the miles. I didn't stop to realise how few of them I was enjoying. Until somehow, that consciousness did permeate. I was walking to tick a box, rather than to explore. I was trudging rather than rambling, stomping rather than exploring. In short, I wasn't having fun.
Individual walks are allowed to be 'not fun' – for the very obvious reason that some of them will be (not fun). There will be blisters and twisted ankles and weather, there will be logistical mishaps and companions you might wish weren't (on this occasion) and getting too lost and the map not matching the ground and bulls in the field and dogs that bite and rivers in flood and all manner of tribulation. Individual walks might only be 'fun' in the re-telling, in the dry, when you've unpacked your sense of humour and given your ego a bit of a talking-to. But "walking", the essence of it, the planning of it, the setting out, and most of the doing of it, and the coming home from it, the catching and conversing on it, on the whole, mostly, in the main, it should be fun.
It wasn't. So I stopped. I scrapped the challenge. I didn't stop walking. I don't drive, so walking is a way of life. I walked into the City. I walked to the swimming pool. I walked to take photographs. I walked. But even so, I had stopped walking. I had lost the essence of it, the purpose, the adventure of it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm unlikely to ever hike the Appalachian Trail or hack my way through the Amazon rain forest, but any walk can be an adventure. For me, for a walk to be such, then it must have no other purpose. Walking for the sake of the walk. A walk for the sake of walking. There is a purity in that.
That, I realised eventually, was what the challenge had sullied. That was what I wanted to get back to. That is what I want to get back to. I want to go walking again.
All through the lock-downs of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, I have walked local paths. I am deeply blessed by and deeply grateful for the river path, the Broad, the park, the marsh. These have been my sanity during the 18 months since I moved into my new home. For most of those months I have not been allowed to stray very far from them. And that is beginning to take its toll on my soul. I know that I am luckier than most to have this much beauty, this much variety, this much green and light and water within my grasp…and I do appreciate it all, every reflection, every dragonfly, every buttercup and butterfly, every dog and dog-violet, the bluebells and blue skies, and the shifting storm clouds and falling leaves of autumn, the flooded meadows and the snows…these things haveheld me together…but there is a point where even the most gilded of constraints starts to feel like a cage…a point where we (I) need a different view, different air, the uncertainty of walking down unknown roads.
There is a line on my current wish-list that reads: I want to walk the way I used to, and the way I once thought I would.
I have lost touch with the hiker in me. And she's sulking.
My old boots are falling apart and my new ones are not broken in.
My feet hurt from carrying too much weight, not from walking too many miles. So with the world opening up again, my question to my Self is how do I get back into it?
I am older now (much) and unfit (very) but I want this possibly more than I ever did. It matters that I walk again, it matters that I explore the paths I haven't been down for years and that I find new ones, I have to go back out to meet myself down the road, in the woods, by the river, on the beach, in the adrenalin of way-finding, and the relief of home-coming, under the sky.
It matters because my soul is hungry for newness. New visible vibrations, new greenery, new blue, new red and orange and yellow and all the other colours through to midnight and starshine. New sounds, new brook-song and wave-roar and bird-song, mud-squelch and sand-crunch. New tastes: sea-salt and samphire, forbidden fruit from across the wall, sandwiches and takeaways seasoned with country smells…and yes, new smells, perfumes, aromas. I want to smell fairgrounds again, all sugary candy-floss and toffee-apple cutting through hot-dog & burger, and smoke – I want a morning or an evening scented with woodsmoke. And of course, I want to touch the planet in all its strangeness. I want to shake hands with the sea, and trust a tree to haul me up a hill-side. I want to sit sifting sand through my fingers, feel the smoothness of a pebble that seems to have travelled many more miles than I can imagine. I don't want nettle sting or midge bite, but maybe I'd welcome them too for the walking again beside the lochs and sleeping early and soundly to wake at dawn.
Because walking isn't just about the walking. It is about the setting out and the arriving and the motion in between, but mostly it is about all the moments – the moments in movement, and the moments in stillness, it is about the broad vista and the minute focus, it is about the sounds and the silence, it is about following your nose and wondering what it's calling you to, and tasting the air, the very breath of the planet, it is about touching roughness and smoothness and spikiness and heat and cold and the past and the future. Walking is about memory, and imagination. It is about getting lost and finding your self.
And I miss it.
