One foot in front of the other

Just before the years changed over, I walked some of the coast near where I live. It reminded me of having done so a few years ago. I wrote about it back then, and I hope you’ll excuse these old words but they said what I wanted today, and still ring a bell for me. I hope for you too.

Solvitur ambulando

8 January 2015

So anyway, the cat died. We inherited her with the house. She was old. Some advice: if you want a cat to die on a Thursday, buy a lot of cat food on the Wednesday.

Also, out of the blue, a friend from back in the day died. I'd not seen him for quarter of a century - a third of a lifetime if you're lucky; less than half if you're not - but he's the sort to have stuck in the mind - while everyone was being wild and crazy (or at least desperate to look like they were) he was bold enough to just be himself, a sort of Devonian John Hurt.

And then yesterday, the insanity of Charlie Hebdo.

Quite the gathering of New Year reminders that we are not immortal. This is not something I like to dwell on for too long - there's tea to make, deadlines to meet, the dog to walk - but once in a while it's something we should allow to swoop through the window and slap us around the face.

I - we - are all going to die. This - as far as we can know - is it. We will, in a blink of an eye, become little more than worm food and a pile of fillings. And, if we are lucky, a few warm feelings left behind.

Even in the time it takes to scroll past that picture, our brains are back pretending this isn't so in order to be able to put one foot in front of the other, to keep getting up and doing whatever, to not be swallowed by the existential fog. So we quietly pretend tomorrow is a day like today, and that there are an infinite number to come.

It is easy to live in denial that the egg timer is running. Or to become too busy, perhaps in quiet rage against negligibility - against our lives having been an irrelevance, without meaning. We might attempt to achieve something, even if that is as simple, and sometimes seemingly impossible as leaving happy offspring. Yet we can be so intent on passing that happy baton that we forget to run with it a while ourselves.

In all this impossibility of time and death, I resolved to not resolve. Instead of resolving, I walked. I rose early, took two trains and got to the beach for sunrise. On the way I passed the cashpoint where my dad withdrew money and just about managed to resist the ridiculous urge to take out money I didn't need just to stand in the place he'd used to so often.

I was born within a mile or two of this beach, and in the mad summer of '76 got so burnt on it that I couldn't raise my arms to put a shirt on. This early, even stepping out at a fair pace didn't warm through the cool air. Perfect.

I'd intended to go past the cliff-top schools camp where I'd washed up, cooked and otherwise idled my way through a few summers, but the tide was out and the beach was too wide and empty to leave.

I went to see Damon Albarn at the Albert Hall just before Christmas - he was brilliant in a way I didn't think possible, given that I wasn't his hugest fan. His recent album is largely about our relationship with technology.

Like most people lucky enough to have the legs of life's stool on the floor more of the time than not, technology runs through most of my life and shows every sign of becoming an even greater part of life on earth. It can be hard to step outside its informative, connective, helpfulness once in while, but when the wind's blowing and every part of you is working, and you strap that phone in your backpack, there's nothing usual for your brain to do.

Thoreau wrote* that "...the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow..." but he wasn't blessed with Twitter, smartphones or the potential for a life as long as ours in the early 21st century. It took me a while of hard walking, sea air and silence for my brain to stop looking for something for me to do; to realise I was already doing it.

Once the usual ropes have been cut, my mind will sometimes hook on to the odd thing; equally, a gorgeous emptiness can happen along if I’m lucky. Either way, walking settles out whatever sediment is hanging in my blood.

Since a midsummer conversation with a friend, I've been faintly, back-of-brain aware of something that needed space to ponder on. He'd turned down a promotion that would have been great career-wise and financially as it would have kept him too busy. I prodded him about it, and it pretty much boiled down to the fact that he only eats animals that have lived the life they were meant to: he'll eat fish if it has lived a fishy life and been caught properly, etc - and that he'd realised there was little point in doing that if he didn't extend the same respect to himself.

Dead cats, dead friends, dead cartoonists and policemen. Somehow, as Bukowski said, one by one, those days run away like wild horses over the hills. That day, it was me heading over those hills, taking one back from the great bank of work days, sedentary days and other oknesses. I was a free range human and it felt good.

A breakfast, two hard hours of walking in to it, was as close a last-meal amazingness as I can remember. A handful of nuts and raisins with a huge glug of water at the top of the penultimate climb hours later was, genuinely, as good as anything I ate over Christmas. Perhaps everything tasted so good because, for a short time at least, tasting it was all I was doing, and that doing exactly that is maybe the best way of thumbing your nose to the egg timer.

I meant to walk for 12 miles but Strava tells me I did 20.9, arriving at the beach nearest home for sunset. 8 hours from start to finish. I can lose 8 hours in an instant, prevaricating over a thing I'm writing, yet this felt like a week away: a week where I'd been doing one thing - and only one thing - at a time.

As Geoff Nicholson wrote in The Lost Art of Walking, "Writing is one way of making the world our own and...walking is another."

*Hemingway also walked a lot, and as he wrote in A Moveable Feast: "It was easier to think if I was walking" and, even more air-punchingly insightfully "...or seeing people doing something that they understood...". Amen to that.