Wandering Back

It’s nearly the winter solstice, and I realise it has been more than a year since I first set up Wanderings, and that it is only now that I am writing my first newsletter. I’d intended Wanderings to be a place where I could share some of the walking and thinking that I get up to, as well as news and snippets about my forthcoming work. But then a series of personal disasters hit and I ended up spending most of 2024 either dealing with crises (the impending loss of my job; the actual loss of my job; the potential end of my academic career; an unexpected loss of control over my chronic illness), or recovering from them (two-hour afternoon naps have become annoyingly regular). If you looked in then, and hoped to hear from me, I can only apologise.

Now, though, the year is turning, and I find myself, with unexpected and major life changes having knocked me about, yearning for community. You might be too - this can be a difficult time of year at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. If so, I hope you’ll join me as I take walks, physical and imaginary, on foot and with books. I have found walking really helpful for grounding me when I feel like life is spiralling out of control. If nothing else can be relied on, I can at least trust my feet to take me forward. It doesn’t need to be very far or very fast for walking to soothe me, and with two young children to look after I often go neither very far nor very fast. So, I will not necessarily be writing about grand walks on the epic scale, though I hope to have some of those as the weather improves. Rather, I hope in my newsletters to bring you walks and writers with whom we can all connect, wherever we are and whatever our bodies enjoy doing. You don’t need to suffer on a big mountain to feel connected to the outside, to nature, to others, to yourself. Sometimes, just being is enough.

I was reminded of this the other day when I took a walk with my son along the Tweed in Peebles in the Scottish Borders. The walk I’d planned - up the Tweed, out of the park, past the castle, over the railway bridge, and back to town - is a walk I have taken many, many times - sometimes on its own, other times as a prelude to a longer (sometimes much longer) walk. Two year ago I took my son on this route for our first ever walk alone together. That experience forms the Epilogue of my new book, Pathfinding. This time, though, my son and I didn’t make it even as far as the end of the park. There’s a distracting playpark and, while I avoided it the last time I came here with my son, this time he was adamant we go. In the end we only walked about a mile and a half to the playpark and back, but our time together was an important reminder of the richness of experiences that walking brings, if you can be patient.

My son isn’t patient, but he is inquisitive, and so it was that we stopped at every bench in the park to discuss its exact colour. He’s six now and his vocabulary is increasing rapidly, and while standing staring at a greenish-blue bench wouldn’t have been my first choice of activity for a Saturday afternoon, somehow my son made it magical as he sought for the exact combination of words to describe what he could see. I loved that he wanted to be precise, to do justice to the unexpected complexity of the task. ‘Dark turquoise’, he allowed eventually.

After running round the playpark like an over-excited collie dog for half an hour, my son then embarked on a series of experiments to do with flow in a river, and buoyancy. He sought out sticks and stones from an exposed section of river bank, the bank’s walls yeast-brown, its soil as crumbly. Darkening (and frankly rotting) leaves were scooped up and chucked from the footbridge, and my son was ecstatic to see some whizzing off downstream having landed square in the middle of the current, while others just a few centimetres closer to land found themselves caught in the shelter of a beach and entered into a loop quite apart from the main flow of the river.

Had I been alone I would never have taken the time to stop for these things. I would have been too squeamish to pick up the leaves, too incurious to wonder about the way sticks move in water, too impatient to be moving forward as the winter light ebbed grudgingly from the sky. I would have been wrong.

Nan Shepherd would have understood, though, what my son was about, with her willingness to look at the world literally upside down and through her legs. I love re-reading the section of The Living Mountain where she describes the singular power slowing down, the value of changing her perspective. ‘Haste’, she writes, ‘can do nothing with these hills’. Even after hours of looking, she acknowledges, ‘I had hardly begun to see’.

So, as much as I love walking by myself, I am going to try to remember that walking with my son forces me to change my perspective in ways playful and nonsensical, and -as Nan Shepherd knew - also powerful and profound. Not all walking has to be fast, or purposeful, or ‘exciting’ to matter: in this as in so much else it is what we find on the journey that makes the journey meaningful.