I could write it, in summary, like this:
4:20am. Tuesday. I’m awake. By which I mean my alarm is making noise and my eyes are open and I’m turning off the alarm and I’m no longer asleep. 4:47am, I’m sitting next to Laura, on the platform at Latimer Rd tube stop. Then we’re on the train at Euston. Then we change trains a few times and its 11:30, but I feel like it’s the afternoon and we’re in Wales, in Betws Y Coed. We get on a bus, then walk for an hour through farms and that sort of thing, dump our stuff in a bunk house and we eat lunch, then I climb a mountain, come back down and go to bed and get up early the next day, walk back through a farm, get back a bus, eat breakfast at the railway station café, get on a train or two, kill time in Lladdudno Junction and finally, thirty six hours later, I’m back in London.
Or like this:
I say I climbed a mountain. Laura climbed a mountain. I followed her. Slowly, rather inelegantly and extremely inexpertly, I pulled myself to the top, though my body complained bitterly at being made to be so physically engaged with the outside. I don’t go outside. Well, I do. In order to sit in a park and read a book. Or, when I lived in Sydney, in a house, to hang out my washing. But yesterday I somehow crawled up a great big pile of rock; and I’m not actually sure how I feel, how I felt, about that, but I do now begin to understand the temptation of the climb-every--mountain type analogy somewhat more empirically now.
Or I could describe it in terms of what I felt, what I thought about.
I felt and thought a wide variety of emotions and ideas.
This is what I felt: disbelief; reluctant excitement; an inexpressible need to cry; terrified; appreciation; quietly chuffed; pain.
Disbelief
What was I doing, why was I doing it, why had I ever thought this was something I wanted to do. Why was I hanging on to a piece of rock a long way above the ground?
Reluctant excitement
Wow, isn’t this cool. I’m out in the real world doing something and not checking facebook and that behind me is a stunning view, can I take a photo please (translation: can I stand still for a moment)? Wow, look at that aeroplane that just flew below us – Why am I here again, and can I go home now?
An Inexpressible Need to Cry
Only I didn’t cry. Which in itself is quite an achievement for me. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Occasionally when directed to go up, obvious really, I would look at a bit of rock that my brain told me I couldn’t go up, and I wanted to cry. I wanted this rock cleft for me, and more than anything I wanted to hide in it and melt away into insignificance and not have to go any higher. And certainly not have to face coming back down again.
Terrified
Because I don’t know anything about mountains or climbing or any such thing, and there I was doing something I didn’t know how to do with no reason to believe that I could, or that I wouldn’t fall.
Appreciation
Of Laura, for having a skill and a passion for an activity that I’d never really considered and for putting up with me.
Quietly chuffed
Ok. I’m at the top now. Be cool. Smile. But not too much, you’ve only done what countless others have done before.
Pain
Because I rarely require my muscles to do much more than climb the stairs at work, and goodness, on a two show day, that’s enough up and down for me. Also, because my shoes were too small.
My thoughts included the obvious, it was a long way down, and included some unsought memories, things that I’d not thought about in months, or in fact years, yet, with just a bit of outdoor climbing induced stress, there they were flooding my mind. This is what I thought about: My year 8 camp abseiling instructor; the possibility of falling off; Northern Ireland.
My abseiling instructor
Who told me I’d never achieve anything in life. If I didn’t partake in the abseiling session. I was on camp in 1996. I was 14 and I refused to abseil. I didn’t believe him, but I also never let go of his criticism. Still I did enjoy my afternoon sitting in the sunshine reading a book while the rest of my class walked backwards off a cliff.
The Possibility of falling off
You could fall off, purposefully, if you wanted to. I realised that, I didn’t actually consider it. It just floated into my head. Like those people at tube stops who apparently contemplate their own destructive potential to others should they push them at just the right time. Like those who just contemplate jumping. Standing on the edge of a mountain, you realise the destructive potential of just stepping off.
Northern Ireland
In the summer. And of the bed that I slept in. Feeling content. But maybe I wasn’t. I thought of Port Stewart and walking five hours along the coast, to the Giant’s Causeway and sitting down on the side of the road 15 minutes in to that five hour walk, and crying because I hadn’t brought my flip flops or had the wrong jumper on or something stupid like that. And he thought I was mad and said just go back and get them because he didn’t understand, but I didn’t understand either. Because when I’m stressed I can’t think. And I don’t admit I’m stressed until later, until it doesn’t matter anymore. Because I don’t always like thinking about me or my life, because I end up convinced I’ve somehow failed, so I stay busy, and then get stressed on holidays because I’m forced to stop and let my thoughts catch up with me and run me down, so perhaps I was discontent and stressed because reality stubbornly refused to match my dreams, but I was happy, and aware that there I was, in my future, on the other side of the world and living life, but squeezing the happiness out of me due to my habit of living under the fear of making the wrong choice and missing out on better things.
I missed Northern Ireland. I longed for it. I longed for what I felt and who I thought I was when I was there, and that was a surprise, not to think these things, but to think them half way up a mountain, when those thoughts seemed so far off and unconnected to the present.*
So there you have it. I climbed a mountain. It was a lot of things. It was fun and tiring, terrifying and amazing. It made me think through a million things and maybe now, even though I didn’t walk backwards off a cliff aged fourteen, I’ll think differently about what I’m capable of, because perhaps that was all my abseiling instructor was getting at. I might even think differently about what, if anything, I’ve achieved, which after all was the point of this Thirty Things exercise.
* Editing this a month and a bit later is a strange experience in itself. I’d almost forgotten how this memory had struck me with enough force to knock me off the mountain. Reading it now, its like reading about someone else in a novel, because no longer where I’m at emotionally. I appreciate now that I’m the same person who was in Northern Ireland last summer, and that though things have changed and while the memories, thoughts and feelings I connect with that place are still mine, are still true, they are faded, and instead of inspiring a sickening longing, a nostalgia, desire to return, they inspire a longing for real and lasting contentment, and a sense of gratitude, an acceptance of what was and who I am regardless and a readiness to keep on being me, the me that God created and saved me to be, whatever that entails. And in that readiness, I think, if I may be so presumptuous, lies the road to contentment. Huzzah.
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