Sunday 16th June - Ashwick to Asham Walk

When I proposed to do another walking challenge, one of my reservations was the effect that over-exercising might have on my mental health.  Getting over-tired, or not eating enough because my body is too focused on walking to remember to be hungry, tends to knock me off balance if my body isn’t expecting it.

When I last spent a month walking as much as possible, in 2021, a friend wrote an encouraging comment about walking being good for body, mind and spirit, but, as with most things that are good for the mental health of normal people, it doesn’t necessarily work that way for me.  2021 wasn’t a good year, and the best thing I could say about July of that year was that I was tired enough after days of walking that I didn’t have trouble sleeping.

By now, I’m capable of being reasonably sane for a fair amount of the time, and for the first half of the month, I was fine as long as I kept walking.  I only really started to have difficulties when a few days of wet weather kept me indoors and I had time to brood over how much of a psychological screw-up I am generally, and feel frustrated with myself for being like this. 

I got into a stupid argument on the internet about methods of weaning foals, sparked by a fanfic about a horse that someone had written.  I knew that I was being stupid in arguing about it when I don’t have personal experience of working with horses and the person writing the story did, but I identified with the foal in the story because his distress at being separated from his mother reminded me of my own experiences of loneliness, as a child, teenager and young adult. 

So I felt annoyed with myself for still being traumatised by experiences that wouldn’t be traumatic for a normal child and had happened twenty, thirty or forty years ago.  I felt that, having already given up hope when I was three years old, I was already too psychologically damaged to grow into a healthy teenager or a sane adult, so that I constantly failed to get jobs or lost them because I had convinced myself that I couldn’t hold down a job and that something was wrong if I was even offered one, and that, by the time I met PDB11 when I was in my thirties, I was already far too damaged to be capable of keeping a loving relationship going. 

This was in the face of the fact that we have known each other for nine years, been married for seven, and still love each other deeply and are amazed at how lucky we are to have found each other.  Most of the time when I’m not being depressed and stressful, we are very happy to be together – but even at the times when one or other of us is miserable, we cling closer to each other rather than drawing away. 

Depression doesn’t think rationally about such things.  It says, ‘Yes, well, maybe some people love you, but it’s a pity you ever gave them the chance to get to know you, because if you sometimes take a wrong turning on a walk because you’re daydreaming and not concentrating on the path, it proves that you’re such an evil narcissist that you not only can’t relate to people as people but can’t even interact with things, because you’re so self-obsessed that the only relationship you can have is with yourself, so you are bound to be an abusive partner in any relationship you get into, and if you’d had a shred of saving grace, you’d have stayed single.’

Still, I’d calmed down by Saturday afternoon, and enjoyed walking up to Midsomer Norton to attend a From The Top concert in which PDB11 was playing, which included the first ever performance of a piece he had written, War Is Futile or The Discourse of the Djinn, inspired by Javanese gamelan music, which sounded very different compared to the western classical and folk traditions of most of the rest of the pieces.  It was a good and varied concert on the theme ‘music from the British Isles’, which ranged from traditional folk songs from Britain and Ireland to music by composers born in Britain but with very un-British-sounding names (such as Gustav Holst). 

However, PDB11 and I agreed that it was stretching it to include a tune which, even most of us in this country know it either as the tune of ‘Lord of the Dance’ by the English Sidney Carter or as part of the Irish dance show Riverdance, started out as the American Shaker hymn ‘Simple Gifts’ by Joseph Brackett, before it was popularised by Aaron Copland and by Sidney Carter (who both had the decency to acknowledge it as a Shaker hymn), and then by Ronan Hardiman (who didn’t). 

At the same time, I reflected that there is something unhealthy in my attitude to Christianity, in that, in depressive moods, I am more likely to picture Jesus, not as Carter’s ‘incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality,’ but as a mad ringmaster jerking my chain and forcing me to dance for his amusement, like a dancing bear – and yet I don’t leave the church, when a sane person who thought Jesus was really like that would certainly give up on Christianity.  I suppose it’s because not all of my mind believes this – but the paranoid side does.

On Sunday, the weather was looking bright and clear, and I was looking forward to a long walk.  I got out early enough to take a roundabout route through Benter and Ashwick before finishing up at Ashwick Church in time for the service.  I even saw a deer as I was out walking, which was exciting.

I was looking forward to spending some time in church before continuing with my walk, but then, inevitably, something in one of the Bible readings triggered my anxieties, and the fact that this wasn’t the reading that the vicar actually preached about just left me to worry on my own.  I tend to home in on verses which could be interpreted as saying either something that most people would consider fair but which would make being a Christian fairly pointless (for example, that we will be judged on what we have done in our lives, and punished or rewarded as we deserve – in which case, what was the point in Jesus dying to atone for our sins, if we still won’t be forgiven?), or things which would be blatantly unfair (for example, that God will punish, not just bad people, but anyone who doesn’t know Him – whether good people who don’t believe in God, or believers who just happen not to have been granted personal experience of knowing God – and that God even deliberately deludes some people into believing lies so that they won’t be saved, but that we are supposed to trust Him to tell the truth to us).

Logically, I can see that if the Bible writers had actually believed that God was like this, they wouldn’t have bothered trusting God.  But when I’m panicking, I react without thinking. I walked out of church, too miserable to sit through the service.  I sat outside until it had finished, waiting for an opportunity to talk to Mandy the vicar and to have an after-service cup of tea and biscuits.  Mandy, and PDB11, and my mum when I phoned her, all did their best to calm me down, but I felt inconsolably wretched.

PDB11 asked me whether I felt up to going for an all-day walk, and I decided that I did.  Going home wasn’t likely to improve my mood, going walking at least meant I could feel that I had done something productive with the day, and I hoped it could give PDB11 a respite from my mood (if he didn’t spend the day worrying about me).  Setting out, I was able to cheer up a bit, enjoying the walk and the warm sunshine, and I kept sending PDB11 text messages to let him know that I was okay, and where I’d got to.  Unfortunately, this being the Mendips, he didn’t actually receive each of them when I sent them, but all in a bunch some hours later.

I walked along White Hole Lane through Hudrdlestone Wood, and along the edge of the Serpentine Plantation, to Asham Wood, to follow the East Mendip Way from there.  Finding which path the public are allowed to take through woods (when there isn’t a road) isn’t easy, and I got somewhat lost in Asham Wood, and again in Great Gains Wood when I turned south rather too early.  Conceivably my mood didn’t help, as I was trying to concentrate on finding the path and on my theological worries and emotional insecurities at the same time.

At any rate, by the time I was out of Great Gains Wood, I was more than an hour behind where I expected to be, so I decided to cut it short, get onto Old Frome Road and turn north at the Waggon and Horses, and head home.

I felt as though I had walked over 20 miles, but according to Map My Walk it only came out at 17.  It might not have been the best day’s walking I’ve ever done, but I’m still glad I went.