Off walking again yesterday, as per the training schedule. Unfortunately, a few minutes into my walk, I realised that the battery on my camera had died. Therefore no photographs of where I walked to could be taken. I was quite disapointed, but after a while decided that this was in fact, a good thing to happen.
No distractions! Just me and the walking.
As I huddled up against the wind, under my sunglasses and eventually under my hair, thoughts, emotions and images came and went. It was a wild day yesterday along the coast! The sea was crashing against the sea wall, splashing over in some places and splattering down in front of me. I could taste the salt on my lips, as it was wipped airbourne by the wind and into my face. Fierce!
I know that many of you will be super fit and healthy, but me, I was ready to stop after the first hour! Not even as good a result as last weekend when it was the two hour point that seemed the hardest.
After the second hour it became an endurance test, the wind was really strong against my face, neck and my right ear was getting the brunt of it. My boots had been too wet to wear, after a walk in the rain on Friday night and so I was walking in my sandles. The bones in my legs and feet are really feeling all of that concrete pounding this morning.
Anyway, without my camera and really feeling it in my body, I put one foot in front of the other and was alone with my thoughts apart from the occasional distraction of something interesting to look at. I likened it to a meditation when all you want to do is just get up and get on with things, or when something is uncomfortable in your body or mind or you are just downright bored with the sitting! The sound of the sea rising onto the shore and then falling back down again through the pebbles, I likened to my breathing. I tried to listen and let everything come and go.
It was only four hours in total, I hear you distainfully object to my claims of great pain. It's a long walk to me, for years I have let my body do what feels comfortable or comforting or easy. Apart from the occasional burst of energy and self-discipline where I swam lengths of the pool or spent hours at the gym. I so easily let myself go and this past year I have really let it all hang downwards!
If nothing else this trek is now focusing me back to the exploring my limits and the gentle pushing of my boundaries, both physical, mental and emotional.
Between hour one and hour two, I started to feel so lonely. This project has also highlighted how isolated I have been for much of my life, unintentionally, unconsciously; mostly through fear and delusion. So this whole thing, from the fundraising, to the training and then the trek itself, is all about getting to know myself anew, getting to know my mother or the space she left within me. It's about reclaiming some of the love of life that got misplaced somehow, and filling up that space again.
I am not a victim of anything except my own thoughts and fears and behaviour. With this trek I think I am marking the waste of opportunities in my life, the grief, the love, the potential that still exists.
Walking alone and going away by myself, each step is a shedding of the old me, the old way of being, the fear and the self-doubt. I know that my mother would not want me to have lived my life in fear, she would want me to make the most of what is all around me and the time I have left.
So yesterday, after I allowed that emotion and that loneliness to overwhelm me, I imagined her walking next to me beside the wild sea and through the wind. I talked to her and asked her questions. Had she ever walked along this stretch of the coast? Where had she walked? Did she come down to the beach often and play at the edge of the sea? If she was here today what would she be doing, how would she have been involved in our children's lives? How would her presence in my life have changed me as a mother?
Don't get me wrong these were not questions couched in a feeling sorry for myself tone. Just chatting to my mother, just curious questions. The answers were not too clear, they were taken away on the wind quite quickly. That didn't matter much, it was the asking of the questions and the image of her walking beside me that was important.
I remembered this photograph of her walking along the sea front with her younger sister, although yesterday the memory of the photograph had her hair blowing in the wind just like mine was. In some of our walking together she was the young girl in the photograph. In other moments she was the mother she had been when I was a child, her hair shorter, carefully curled and thickly sprayed with hairspray. No wind could move that hair! She wears glasses now and like my sunglasses, they are being covered with sand and salt as we walk together along the coastal path.
On the last day of July 2010, I am glad that I am remembering my Mother as I walk, totally unexpectedly as she had not been on my mind when I set off. She would have turned eighty this July and I had forgotten.
At the two and a half hour point, I stop in a sea front cafe in the small fishing town at the top of this part of the coast. I order a coffee and sit down for a short rest. There is a woman sitting nearby, about my age or a little bit younger maybe. She is with her mother, out for the afternoon and so clearly looking after her and concerned for her. I ponder this for a moment or two. Is that what I would be doing with my mother these days if she was alive? What would our relationship be like? I think of other mother's and daughters I know.
I am spending too much time alone these days when there are precious people I could be with who are still here in my life. However difficult it may be sometimes, for me to be with people, I know this is what I need and want. Stop with the fear already and listen to the messages that are coming from this part of your journey. There are lots of lovely people to spend time with out there and no need to be alone so often. No need to worry that you won't have time for yourself. Look at how much time you have had already! I wonder how much time my mother had to be by herself, to think, to be creative. Much of her life was taken up being a mother and a wife, and a daughter.
But this is my journey.
