Three Reasons to Go Two Miles an Hour
Lao Tzu was wrong. Remember him? The guy who said that the longest journey begins “with a single step”?
Not my latest one. It began with 217 stair steps up.
This part of the staircase looked so innocent….
A group of six of us had met up the night before in Melrose, a small town in the “border” country of Scotland, for a six-day hike of “St. Cuthbert’s Way,” a west-to-east trek across southern Scotland and northern England that retraces the path the seventh century religious leader took over the course of his lifetime. We’d visited the site of the Old Melrose Abbey, where Cuthbert got his start and later served as bishop, and were excited to get started on the hike.
As I trudged up the stairs that first day (okay, I didn’t actually count the number — may have been closer to a gazillion), I wondered how Cuthbert ever convinced himself to leave Melrose if the path started like this. But by the time we got to the top, we got a partial answer, a view of the Eildon Hills, three volcanic formations the Romans named Trimontium when they invaded in the 1st century AD.
Oz… with gorse!
For the next six days we would be walking over and down and through a countryside that was some sort of mashup of the glowing green of Oz, the lush flora and fauna of Eden, the mystical beauty of Xanadu, all set in real-life geography a hundred miles north of James Herriott’s All Creatures Great and Small.
The Weetwood Bridge has a sign labeling it “weak” — but heck, it’s been around since 1513.
We tromped through mud, straddled streams, opened and closed gates, struggled up hills and crept or slid down them. Brooks babbled, invisible birds sang, highly visible, generally indifferent but occasionally grumpy goats and sheep and cows maahed and mooed. I spent one afternoon trying to find music on my phone that would serve as a worthy soundtrack for all this before realizing I was living in the soundtrack.
And I returned a renewed zealot for this approach to seeing the world (see this earlier piece about my walk down the western boot of Italy). There is just no equivalent way I have discovered that can do as much to rejigger our approach to life and living.
If you haven’t done a long walk before, here’s my case for giving it a shot.
It forces a reboot of mind/body/spirit balance:
I spend most of my normal life in my head, working on brain-centric challenges with people and ideas. A trip like this is, first and foremost, a physical endeavour. You have to get fuel into your body at that start of the day. You have to make your body go and keep going, even if you’re not feeling especially good. Your focus during that going is often ridiculously narrow – where can I safely put my foot down for this step? And then the next, and the next. And then at the end of the day you need to refuel, rest and recharge, because the next day you are going to be doing it again.
But trips like this are also inherently spiritual. You don’t have to be doing them as “pilgrimages” (defined as journeys “to sacred places for religious reasons”). Going to a new place, on a shared journey, in relative isolation, away from the concerns of everyday life, will inevitably lead you to a re-examination of your spirit. And it’ll give you the time you need to wrestle with any questions you might have.
It forces you to slow down:
I get warnings from my FitBit whenever my heart is beating at a rate higher than what the app thinks it should. “Slow your roll!” it says. That’s not a bad summary of the lesson I’ve learned from these walks. The conventional approach to tourism is to find a list of the top 3 or 5 or 10 things to see in a place and systematically knock them out, presumably so you can brandish them like trophies at the end of your trip. The only two tourist-hyped things we saw during this walk were Melrose Abbey (at the beginning) and The Holy Island (at the end).
But it was in between, in all the places we would normally blow by at 60 miles an hour, that I found the moments I won’t forget.
A long walk gives countrysides the edge over castles…
Serendipity is more likely to come when there is no schedule and there is time to discover the spectacular in the simple.
I got gobsmacked by the surprise vista over the next hill, just when I thought it couldn’t get more amazing. I found flowers miraculously taking root in a thousand-year-old stone wall. I had time to appreciate the full ecosystem of a mossy rock I was sitting on at lunch. We got to track rainstorms for miles as they headed toward us. We faced off with an angry herd of cows, and had to scramble for an exit strategy.
You can’t see details at 60 miles per hour…
Going slow also gives you the time for long conversations with friends and strangers; to get time for the looong conversations with friends you normally only get a few minutes with; to meet a stranger and learn about their hopes and fears and, perhaps, completely different approach to the world.
Of course it’s easier to go slow when you have to go slow, but is there any compelling reason we can’t find ways to do it more in real life?
It gives you time to question your assumptions:
Walking in any strange place gives you a chance to appreciate how much of our “conventional wisdom” we have accepted without question. Here are just a few assumptions I have reexamined during this past week in southern Scotland and northern England:
· Is there any particular reason men shouldn’t wear skirts?
Every culture makes different assumptions about what it normal. Why do we assume ours are correct?
· Why am I okay eating pork belly but not sheep belly?
· Are bagpipes really inherently more annoying than acid rock?
· Why did Americans give up on the notion of “pubs” – places where a broad range of people can talk without killing each other?
· Who’s to say if it makes more sense for horses to run counterclockwise around racetracks instead of clockwise? To pass people on the right side of sidewalks or drive on the right side of the road?
· What’s so bad about walking in the rain?
So now I’m back and there’s a familiar dilemma. Once you’ve been to the mountaintop (or the hillside or the valley), it’s easy to be seduced into wanting to stay there. It’s also easy to come back home and forget about whatever it is you’ve just learned. I think both those approaches are wrong.
Unless we’re liquidating our lives, there’s a time limit to adventures. But if we learn anything while adventuring, we need to find a way to integrate our mountaintop epiphanies into our “real” lives.
I’m trying these for now:
· Give conversation with people priority over efficiency in to-do lists.
· Find new ways to get physically exhausted more often; give time to the spirit every day.
· Spend more time trying to understand different points of view.
The “pilgrim’s path” to the Holy Island marks the end of St. Cuthbert’s Way. It’s a three-mile, unforgettable barefoot walk across a tidal basin.
I came to that list after 180,177 steps. Maybe my long journey over the next few months begins with those 3 steps. Wanna go with me? Better yet, wanna take your own long walk?
References:
St. Cuthbert’s Way: https://www.stcuthbertsway.info
Background on Lao Tzu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi
Ten of the many pilgrimage adventures available to take: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/top-pilgrimage-routes-around-the-world
Christ on staying up on the mountain: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2017%3A1-8&version=NIV