Why I Walk

Let’s be honest: if I take up long walks in Lent, or even from shortly after Christmas, this is in no way a penitential (related to pain, punch, punish, repine, and subpoena) exercise.  It isn’t an attempt to atone for the Christmas cake I ate in December or the chocolate I’m going to eat in April.  It isn’t because I think God is going to love me more if I come home with blistered feet and stiff joints, or because I hope that inflicting weariness and mild discomfort on myself will help me to empathise with Jesus’s experience of being tortured to death.

What it may be, however, is a pensive (related to pendant, depend, expensive, pansy, pendulum, pension, perpendicular, poise, ponder, recompense, and many more words relating to hanging, weighing, and thus, mentally weighing up ideas – if you were wondering, pansies bear that name because they are the flowers that symbolise thoughts and remembrance, not because they are so often found in hanging baskets) journey.  Walking, I tell myself, can be a good time to think.

Well, yes – but I can think when I’m at home, trying to work out what the fallacy is in the book I’m reading.  And when I’m really physically tired, towards the end of a long walk, I often feel too mentally tired to think anything beyond, ‘It’s two miles to home, so that’ll take me – uh – two hours?  Will it be dark by then?  Hold on, I meant to be walking along the edge of Middle Wood, why am I in Stratton-on-the-Fosse?’

Perhaps part of the reason I set off for long, solitary walks is that I like the combination of mental challenge in finding my way around unaided (especially given that my lack of sense of direction had been a family joke for much of my life) and the physical challenge of seeing what my rather lazy, not very well co-ordinated, forty-year-old body is willing to do.  I enjoyed the challenge of last summer’s sponsored walk, and by the end of it, I was pleased at having walked three hundred miles in a month, but I wondered whether, with training, I could have managed more.

Mainly, though, I walk because I can’t bear not to.  Probably because of having been a country child until the age of six and then moved to Southampton (which is a city fortunate enough to have plenty of parks, and to have paths leading up along the River Itchen to Winchester, and to be near the New Forest – but none of this alters the fact that it is a city), I grew up craving green spaces. 

After nearly thirty years in Southampton, I finally moved to Somerset, and I haven’t stopped craving what I now have: the freedom to go out for a walk, as far as I can manage, across the layers of mist-wrapped hills and the valleys in between them. 

Satisfying the addiction just feeds it.  I don’t crave food or even books as much as I crave to walk to the edge of the next field, and see what’s on the other side of it.

Put like this, it sounds extremely selfish, and this is because it is.  But one of the things that I am learning later in life than most people is that enhancing my own happiness doesn’t necessarily diminish someone else’s.  I had wondered whether going off for long walks on my own meant that I was neglecting PDB11, when he might want to have a companion to cuddle and play Scrabble with if he feels lonely or bored.  After all, he’s been going through a stressful time lately (and not just because of dealing with my moods).

But then he mentioned to our therapist that one of the things he likes doing to relieve stress is playing music, but that he can’t if I need quiet to concentrate on writing or meditating, or if I’m doing music practice of my own.  I hadn’t realised that he needed space as much as I did – but finding out made things a lot easier.

At the same time, I know that PDB11 worries about me when I’m out on my own – both because of my emotional volatility and the risk that getting over-tired and hungry might bring me home depressed or angry, and because he knows from past experience that I am capable of getting lost within a mile of home.  So I send text messages when I’m out, to let him know where I’ve got to and how I’m feeling.

But the fact that he has reason to worry is precisely why I need to go out alone.  It is, after all, much better for him to have a confident, competent wife than a clingy, self-doubting child-substitute.  And to be a competent adult, I need both to master practical skills like map-reading, and to learn not to slip on the tricky bits of terrain in my own mind.

All the same – this sounds a lot more like self-centred self-improvement than walking as pilgrimage, a journey towards holiness.  If walking is mainly something I do to satisfy my desires and overcome my deficiencies, what room does that leave for God?

Well, it leaves room for praying about things I see as I walk along, from schools to war memorials. 

It leaves room for calling in at village churches I pass through, now that, thankfully, some of them are again open for private prayer. 

It leaves room for being awestruck at the sheer beauty of God’s creation, from sunrise

to the rising moon,

and from the white outline of a silver birch tree in winter

to rainbows which I take so many pictures of when they’re barely starting to show themselves that I run out of camera battery before the rainbow is fully ripe. 

But mainly, it leaves room for seeing God not as an authoritarian who wants to narrow our range of activities as far as possible (preferably to being walled up in a small cell with nothing to do except pray and read the Bible) but as a generous God who means life to be a blessing for us to enjoy respectfully and gratefully.  It leaves room to recognise that, as Sidney Carter wrote,

‘Round the corners of the world I turn.

More and more about the world I learn.

All the new things that I see,

You’ll be looking at along with me.’

It leaves room for setting off into adventure, not blindly or foolishly, but without knowing for certain how it will go, and trusting God to help me find my way home.