Walking with Plato (7 page)

After a glorious night’s sleep, and a glorious breakfast of cereal
and toast
, Wendy and I set off on a modest thirteen-mile hike along the western shore of Loch Lochy to
Gairlochy
.

Our route lay mostly along forest tracks, which are generally rather dull work. But not on this day.

The previous evening, I had introduced Wendy to an idea that had been brewing in my mind for a day or two. The idea of ‘Gary-time’.

Gary-time was my proposed solution to two separate problems. The first was that I was finding long-distance walking rather too monotonous, and needed to inject some mental stimulation into my routine if I were to reach Land’s End psychologically intact. The second was that constant companionship – even Wendy’s – was becoming too much for a dyed-in-the-wool introvert like me, and I needed to get some regular doses of mental space if I were to avoid frustration and grumpiness.

My proposed solution to both problems was that each day I would spend some walking time listening to audio-books or music on my smartphone. This would provide me with both the mental stimulation and the uninterrupted periods of solitude I required.

I confess to having had some misgivings about broaching the subject with Wendy. I thought that perhaps she would find the concept of Gary-time offensive. But, in fact, she was cool with it. Perhaps – and this thought has only just occurred to me – she was glad of the opportunity to enjoy some Wendy-time.

So, that day, I enlivened a two-hour stretch of the forest path between South Laggan and Gairlochy by listening to the audio-book
Buddhism for Beginners
, by the American Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield.

At one point, Kornfield shared a poem by the seventeenth-century Japanese monk Gensei.

Gensei describes taking an autumn walk, coming to a stream, and finding that the bridge across it has been washed away by the rain. Undeterred, he removes his sandals and wades through, delighting in the shallowness of the stream and the firmness of the rocks beneath his feet.

The poem ends:

The point in life is to know what’s enough –

why envy those otherworld immortals?

With the happiness held in one inch-square heart

you can fill the whole space between heaven and earth.

The poem conjured up some nice images. Even so, I would normally have passed over it without much thought, and perhaps soon forgotten it. But not on this day. On this day, I felt a deep connection with the poet and his state of mind.

In the same way that he had delighted in the shallowness of the stream and the firmness of the rocks, I too had begun to appreciate the familiar qualities of everyday objects: the soft absorbency of a towel, the firm supportiveness of a chair, the warmth and comfort of a carpeted floor.

I had experienced those things every day for almost half a century. Yet I had never really attended to them, and never really appreciated them. I had never realized that everyday life holds such an abundance of simple pleasures.

I wondered if it would be possible for me to hold onto that realization when JoGLE was over; when towels and chairs and tables and beds became commonplace again.

It occurred to me that the man or woman who, like Gensei, could hold onto that realization, and could take ever-fresh delight in the simple pleasures of life, would require few possessions to be richer than Croesus.

These interesting and pleasant thoughts occupied my mind as I walked through the forests on the western shore of Loch Lochy. At other times, when the path emerged from the trees, the view of the loch and the towering mountains in the distance was enough.

At lunchtime, Wendy and I took advantage of a spell of sunshine and stopped for a picnic on a rocky shore. I can still see her, sitting there, on a rock beneath a bent old tree, in her red wind-shirt and battered sun-hat, with her rucksack at her feet, looking for all the world like the jolly swagman who sat by a billabong under the shade of a coolibah tree.

Our destination was Gairlochy, which consists of little more than two pretty locks, which connect a section of the Caledonian Canal to the southern end of Loch Lochy.

We arrived there quite early in the afternoon. However, the nearest campsite was a mile or two off the trail, which meant that we had to finish an otherwise pleasant day with some tedious and unproductive road-walking.

We had passed no shops that day. Nor on the previous day. So we decided to use our emergency packets of dehydrated potatoes and meatballs for dinner. We’d bought them prior to setting off on JoGLE, and had been carrying them for the best part of two hundred miles.

They were horrible.

The following morning, we feasted – in the loosest sense of the word – on cereal bars before retracing our steps to Gairlochy, ready for our final assault on the Great Glen Way.

We had just twelve miles to cover. And because they were flat, easy miles, and because the sun was shining, and because, after two consecutive days of short walks, our feet were feeling a whole lot better, we felt good.

First, we walked along a pretty section of towpath that runs between the canal and the River Lochy, arriving around lunchtime at Neptune’s Staircase, a magnificent series of eight individual locks, which joins the Caledonian Canal with the sea loch, Loch Linnhe, sixty-four feet below.

From there, our route ran alongside Loch Linnhe, with fine views of Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest mountain, then through a housing estate in the village of Corpach, and finally into
Fort William
, the largest town in the West Highlands.

Our destination was the Glen Nevis Caravan and Camping Park, an enormous campsite catering for the vast numbers of campers, caravanners, hikers, climbers, mountain-bikers, cyclists, and other assorted nature enthusiasts that converge upon Fort William each year.

To get there, we had to walk through the town centre, past the obelisk that marks the southern end of the Great Glen Way, and then past the signpost that marks the northern end of the West Highland Way. So, in a single day, we got to finish one national walking trail and begin another.

The campsite was beautifully situated in a deep valley at the foot of the mighty Ben Nevis. The afternoon was young. We had the entire evening ahead of us, and an entire day off to look forward to. Life was good.

One thing I learned very quickly on JoGLE is the inestimable value of a day off.

A day off provides you with necessary rest for your tender feet and tired body. It relieves you of the morning chore of taking down your tent and the evening chore of setting it up again. It gives you time to wash and dry your clothes, to stock up on groceries, to plan the next stage of your journey, and even to lounge around reading a novel or listening to music.

It’s an oasis of ease and comfort.

To the non-walker, it may sound strange to hear a day spent camping in a backpacker tent, catching up on laundry, and shopping for groceries described as an oasis of ease and comfort.

But comfort is a relative concept.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, wrote: ‘What the English call “comfort” is something inexhaustible and illimitable. Others can reveal to you that what you take to be comfort at any stage is discomfort, and these discoveries never come to an end.’

He was absolutely right.

For example, when you sleep every night in a backpacker tent, your idea of comfort is a hostel bed, a proper cooker, and a table and chairs. When you sleep every night in a hostel, your idea of comfort is your own little house with its own little kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. When you live in your own little house, your idea of comfort is a big house with a designer kitchen, more en-suite bedrooms than you know what to do with, and a double garage.

And even when you have all of that, you still find yourself hankering after further comforts: better TVs, faster broadband, reclining armchairs, plusher carpets . . .

However much you have, you will always want more.

This insatiable hunger for ever-greater levels of comfort is fuelled, in large part, says Hegel, by ‘others’, by the people around you who have bigger, better, nicer stuff than you do, and by the advertisers whose mission in life is to convince you that nobody in their right mind could possibly be content with the stuff you have right now.

Epicurus understood that. That’s why he and his disciples moved outside the city, away from ‘others’ and out of temptation’s way.

Epicurus also understood that you pay for your comforts. And not just with money. You pay for them with long hours at the office, work-related stress, frenetic family life, and lack of time and energy for the things that really interest you.

Far better, he argued, to learn to be content with what is sufficient rather than to be constantly striving for more. ‘Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little,’ he said.

Or, as Gensei put it, ‘The point in life is to know what’s enough.’