Our journey has been months in the future for so long that it came as shock to realise that we fly to Germany in just two weeks today. It feels as if there is still so much more preparation to do but I am just not quite sure what it is!
A couple of days after we leave, we will start our walk and life will be very different. We will be forever accompanied by our rucksacks, blisters and sore joints. We will have minimal changes of clothes and have no home comforts, such as a comfy chair in front of the television, a familiar bed with clean sheets and on-tap broadband. Food choices will be limited to meals in restaurants, bars, cafes and hotels, or to meals that we can assemble from cold ingredients such as bread, cheese and cold cuts of meat. An exception will be those occasions when someone offers us hospitality – no many so far. This will be our lives for two months.
Apart from the food choices, it is a liberating thought. All that we will need will be on our backs. Our lives stripped down to the bare essentials.
That includes, I am forced to admit, a new shiny red notebook pc, weighing just over one kilogram, purchased with the sole purpose of maintaining this blog. Well, OK, it will also allow me to play poker when we have a decent connection within range. And yes it will be useful to allow us to synchronise our iPODs, so that we can get all of those essential Podcasts. Did I mention that our iPODs are part of the bare essentials that we have stripped down to? But the laptop and the iPODs are the only real gadgets. The digitial camera is obviously an essential to document our trip and post pictures on the blog. And, after all, I did deprive myself of the lovely GPS, map on your wrist gizmo, in favour of the greater integrity of a protractor compass and maps. As I said, stripped down to the bare essentials.
Something I do not yet know is how we will spend our time when we are not walking. Our aim is to walk twenty Kilometres, or about fifteen miles, per day. This should take us about five to six hours which is a lot of walking day in, day out. But on the other hand, six hours is not a big chunk out of a day. If we started at, say 09:00 and broke for an hour at lunch, we would be finished walking by around 16:00. Then what? There is only such much reading one can do and only so many books that one can carry – the latest copy of Don Quixote is bloody heavy I can tell you. Buying replacement reading material in Germany will be easier for Doris than for I.
That reminds me of all the things I haven't prepared such getting the material together so that I can turn my novel into a screenplay, rather than carry the book that tells you how to write a screenplay! I now see that I have prepared for walking but not for not walking!
But hang on a minute isn't this, dare I say, a very Western attitude? The need to be doing things? The idea of a pilgrimage had its origins in Eastern, or more specifically Indian, traditions. In those traditions, doing nothing, except contemplating, is considered a very good way to spend time: simply being rather than doing. Being, in the present, is the whole point of this journey. And if I can find a way of embracing that idea and being at ease with it, this will be much more than a journey and its influence on us will live well past our journey's end.
No comments:
Post a Comment