Crisis, choice and change

It is 15 months since I wrote, on the eve of beginning this Coast to Coast crossing,  ‘bring it on change’.

I wrote from a belief that our lives were somehow on hold, strangled into relentless routine by becoming full-on carers for the second time. I wrote from a sense of wistfulness for the other times we had walked this way: when the four years it took in each direction were accompanied by profound shifts in both our lives. As the scene moved from sea cliff and lofty moorland, through soft dales to soaring fells, so our circumstances moved too.

Secretly – because of course it makes no real sense – I believed that it was our walking that somehow forced the change. That each step towards west or east coast sent a signal to the universe that it needed to do its part. To reward our physical efforts by rearranging the landscape of our lives.

I quoted, in the very first post of this blog, Sarah Ban Breathnach’s words in her book Something More, “There are three ways to change the trajectory of our lives: crisis, chance and choice.”

But what this new Coast to Coast was really about, I think, was calling out to the universe again; asking it to step up one more time in return for Shushie and I doing our part. We had both reached a point where it was hard to see quite how life could go on as it was. We were exhausted, lost, frustrated, and in denial about some of the nastier emotions we sometimes felt. I’d labelled the small breakdowns I was experiencing  as burnout. Shushie hinted at something even darker.

fledging

It wasn’t only about having to accommodate the caring in already busy lives, though there were days when I wanted to stamp my foot like a child and scream how unfair it was. Unfair on us, who had already spent five years in our forties caring for an uncle who had been very little to us when he was well, but so little to other people too that there seemed no-one else to take on his care. Unfair on me, who, in the same week mum was felled by a stroke, was looking forward to the first child fledging -beginning a gap year in Australia which ought to have heralded the first small promise of the freedom of being an empty nester.

Most of all, unfair on our mum, one of the strongest women we knew, whose daily round of visits to sick friends, day centre, lunches, outings and quiz nights, involved walking – marching in her case – miles every day. It was inconceivable that someone so fit, so determined, so stubborn, might be stopped in her tracks when for 78 years nothing and no-one else had been able to change her course.

Please understand, I know that there is nothing special about our situation. Other people care. Some of them care more and better than we do. Other people – including mum perhaps – have much more to deal with. But we can only be us and experience our own lives. And all of this was happening to us at a time when we’d been led to expect life should be opening up. When the long, tough years of making and breaking relationships and hearts, of  bringing children through their own, significant challenges, of juggling demanding jobs along with it all, and just, well, trying so damm hard to get it right for everyone, ought to have been levelling out, like the jagged peaks and deep valleys of the Lakes, melting into the gentle green cushion of the Yorkshire Dales. We were due that.

The big ‘c’

So now Shushie and I were pounding through Ennerdale Forest in sunshine, as conscious of the perfectly delicate stems of pink orchid as we were of Pillar’s sharp outline towering above us like a tombstone that, even on this summer’s day, remained always in shade, dark and unknown.

We were one day and no more than 20 miles  from the end of a walk that had taken us half a year longer than we’d expected. The first ‘c’ – crisis: Shushie’s father in law suffering a massive stroke too; mum’s pulmonary embolism followed by the breast cancer becoming so aggressive she needed a mastectomy; and other even less explainable crises involving close family and friends that wholly blindsided us but do not belong on this blog.

The universe had indeed stepped up, with a wry smile on its face, and said ‘you think you know what you want but I know better so here you are: have more of the same and see what you make of it’.

Great joke universe.

Choosing life

Here is what we made of it.

“Doing this walk again saved my life,” Shushie says as we soak up the sun and the scenery.

I wait; want to know that she doesn’t mean she thought of ending it.

“Many times I felt myself teetering on the edge of a black hole. I don’t mean I’d have stepped into it, not that. Getting seriously ill, something I wouldn’t recover from, going out of my mind. It was there, waiting for me, so many times.”

Shushie and I have always shared everything but we never talked about that until this moment. It was her darkness.

“What made the difference was realising that I am just doing too much caring. I care for mum, I care for Maurice and for Pud caring for Maurice. And then I go into work and people want more of me. They want me to care about them and I do because I can’t not. That’s who I am.”

“Yes, you are wholehearted about everything. I see that,” I tell her. “So..?”

A bee buzzes busily close by, frantic to collect the nectar it needs while the rain is absent.

“I’ve thought about this and I’m clear I don’t want to stop caring for mum. And I don’t want not to be able to help out with Maurice and be there for Pud. So I need to stop having a job that is also about people needing me all day every day and me having to give out the whole time.”

“Over-caring.”

“Yep. I just want a happy job. Something I can go to and leave behind afterwards, working with people who are well for a while. Not for ever, but for now.”

It is not a big revelation. We have spoken of it together recently, and there are no crashing chords as in a momentous turning point to accompany Shushie’s words; her decision to leave behind a career of almost four decades. But it is quietly significant, this moment of the third ‘c’ – choice, where Shushie is choosing to save her own life  by recognising and honouring her own needs.

Resistance really is useless

“And you?” she turns to me. We are on a roll now, rocking through these sunlit woods, footsore yet also lighter than we’ve been for so, so long.

“When we started out, and it’s not easy to admit, I suppose thinking about what might happen to change things, I meant us no longer being carers.” I don’t go so far as to use the D word – mum’s death – just as Shushie didn’t use it when we were actually skirting around the subject of suicide.

“I mean I thought the shifts, whatever might happen, would be in the physical world. In our circumstances. When actually what’s changed is much bigger and more significant than that.”

It’s hard to find the words.

“What’s changed is in my mind, all the things that have fallen away,wanting and expecting everything to be a certain way. I don’t know how it happened but it’s as if I’ve let go; as if all my resistance to what’s going on has just melted away.

“It’s what I teach,” I say to Shushie. ” That so much of our pain, our suffering, comes not from what happens but from what we think about what happens.Fighting ‘what is’.”

Loving what is

I can’t pinpoint the moment the shutters in my mind simply gave way under the pressure of the years, like a rotten shed collapsing in the merest breath of wind.  Perhaps the week I spent at Serenity Retreat in Greece, leading other people in healing their lives but, as always, learning so much from them. Hearing myself speak the words that changing our thinking is changing our lives, and really hearing them. Coming home and changing my diet for healthier choices, allowing myself  to sleep longer, shedding some work commitments, even saying ‘no’ once or twice. Like Shushie, understanding that survival means caring for my own needs too.

What I can say is that choosing not to fight ‘what is’, deciding to accept the way things are, has brought me more peace than I have known for more than a decade. I hear Byron Katie‘s voice gently asking the simple questions in her book Loving What Is: Is it true?

Is it true that all of this is hard? Sometimes, yes. Certainly every time I have the thought and repeat the thought that being a carer is hard I make it harder for myself.

Can you be sure it’s true? No, I can’t. Because when I let go of the thought that it is hard there is room for me to think it is a privilege to give love and receive gratitude, to be partnering the sister I love with all my heart in this caring and loving, to spend soft time with our childlike mum when all our lives it was hard and she was hard.

How do you feel when you think the thought that it is hard, Byron Katie asks with understanding? Resentful, wrung out, exhausted.

Who would you be without the thought?

I look at Shushie, glowing in the sunshine. At the trees reaching skywards, but letting in light pools to the soft green forest floor. At the felltops etched sharp against the blue skyline. We can taste the sweet air. Nearby, the beck is flowing down the valley floor, finding a way between boulders smoothed by the years, towards the silver lake and beyond, the sea we will reach tomorrow. Every optimistic wildflower is a jewel flanking the path which continues wide and straight and bright ahead.

It has all been here, this beauty and change and peace, all the time. It always will be.

And all we needed to do was remember that every true  journey happens both without and within, and move to another place in our minds.

 

 

A day among giants

Turns out we weren’t the only ones running late.

From Seatoller to the top of Honister, where a slate mine stands sentry at the dramatic gateway between Borrowdale and Buttermere, is a mile and a half of uphill walking.

As we eased our way uphill, happy now to stop every hundred metres in order to turn a full 360 degrees for the view, we saw only cars. No people.

It was a different story when we reached the mine, where anxious stewards in fluorescent vests scanned the fells to the east, muttering to each other about there not being enough time. Close by a trestle table held a few mean plastic beakers of very weak orange squash.

We were ready for refreshment and parked our rucksacks and sticks close enough to be able to follow the unfolding drama. This was a 10 in 10 event for an MS charity: ten miles in ten hours, which would be generous on flat ground, but appeared to involve something like ten serious peaks as well.

(For the record Shushie and I reckon on averaging two miles an hour for the Coast to Coast, the frequent uphills and our commitment to regular stopping to simply sit and look, compensating for those times on the flat when our feet are flying – er hum – at least for the first few hours of the day.)

The stragglers huffing and puffing into sight were, it emerged, almost six hours into their allotted ten,  and had so far clocked up just four miles. Someone at head office had clearly never been walking in the Lakeland fells.

Clueless

To add to our rather ungenerous sense of superiority, as Shushie took photos, a lycra-ed cyclist heaved up to me from the steep climb we’d just done.

“Is that an OS map?” his bike rammed into my leg but then there was so much sweat on his face I imagine he couldn’t see what he was doing.

“Can you show me where we are on it?”

I did of course, all the while thinking  ‘bloody hell, this is Honister Pass, one of the most famous intersections in the Lakes, and we are sitting outside Honister slate mine, which is on not only on every map but has a dirty great sign on it. How is it you would ride a mile and a half uphill in scorching sunshine without knowing where you are going?’

One thing we were to learn that day was that come the summer, come the crowd who don’t know a compass from a cucumber sandwich. And on any other day but one such as this, with perfect conditions, panoramic views as far as the Irish Sea, and plenty of people with maps to ask, would be a huge liability to themselves.

You will be aware, of course, from previous posts in this blog, that the only reason Shushie and I recognised this phenomenon was because we had been there and been equally clueless on our first Coast to Coast crossing. We were not so superior now that we didn’t feel a little anxious for all those coming in the opposite direction from Ennerdale clutching nothing more than a roughly photocopied sketch of their route, and no idea that the Lakeland fells would be so, well, high!

On top of the world

Talking of which, there was no let-up in the gradient after our coffee stop.

Leaving behind the school groups and coaches at Honister Slate Mine the route joins a disused – vertical – tramline, introduced to save quarry workers from the dangerous job of bringing Honister’s prized green slate down from the fells on hurdles, which they walked in front of  as human brakes on the weight.

But each upward step on slippery shale was, we knew, bringing us closer to one of Lakeland’s stop-in-your-tracks-and-know-there-is-a-heaven views: out towards Buttermere and its neighbour Crummock Water, nestling in the lee of Haystacks, beneath High Crag and High Stile, overlooked by Fleetwith Pike.

There was nothing to do when we reached the top but stop. And sit. And wonder at it all.

To commit it to memory, to bring us back aloft on all the future days when our boots were mired in mud, or grey skies threatened to overwhelm us.

Everything was in such sharp relief: every shadow cast by fluffy clouds on the soft velvet of the slopes; the dancing light and shade of the lakes below; grey rock jagging out from the summits like the teeth of a predator; narrow stone paths picking a way across the fells; in the distance, all this wildness flattening to yellow fields and beyond the suggestion of pale sea; in front of us, across the plunging valley towards Hay Stacks, the merest glimpse of mountain lake  – Innonimate Tarn where Wainwright, our guide, chose to have his ashes scattered.

Of all the fells and dales he walked, this place, this view, was where he felt he would find the most peace through eternity.

And on this day, drinking it all in as thirstily as if our veins had become dessicated during the long, long months before, we could not argue.

Stumbling and signs

For a mile or so, the Coast to Coast route stays on top of the world, following the colourfully named Moses’ Trod – an old cairned road, along which the slate was transported to Wasdale and the west coast. But Moses was more interested in another kind of hard stuff. According to folklore he made his living from distilling and selling moonshine amongst the felltop crags.Perhaps Moses’ Stumbled might have been a more accurate name for this lovely path.

Eventually it was time to leave our mountaintop via the steep descent of Loft Beck, a kind of  chimney stack plunging down into the valley of Ennerdale, between rocks and gulleys so you are forced to twist your body and legs every few steps to accommodate a new angle in the gradient.

Here it was that Shushie and I encountered the same groups of walkers we’d seen leaving Ennerdale Bridge that morning, only now they no longer looked fresh in their new boots and shiny walking gear, but bothered and tentative. Where were they? Were they on the right route, they asked us? Was there far to go? And, lower down, were they even capable of such a relentlessly demanding climb aloft?

cruelty to trees

Company in the forest

Even at the bottom of Loft Beck we were still less than halfway through the day’s allotted 14 miles. For the Ennerdale Valley is only partly silver lake. Coming from the east there are some four miles of forest to march through before the shining waters of this remote silent lake are glimpsed.

It didn’t matter: we were loving every minute of the day, our bodies were working well despite their recent lack of use, the sun was still shining, and we now we’d crossed over with the west to easters we had the whole lovely valley entirely to ourselves.

We sped past Black Sail Hut – claimed as the most remote youth hostel in England – our eyes constantly turning back to the great tombstones of Great Gable and then of Pillar,  solid grey walls of rock rising from the valley floor to intersect with the giants that can be found in the neighbouring Wasdale valley.

Into the forest proper, which had once seemed to us as it seemed to Wainwright: a mutation.

You can hear his gruff Yorkshire voice in what he writes: “Where there are now plantations of conifers there used to be fellsides open to the sky, singing birds and grazing sheep. It was Herdwick country…Those of us old enough to remember the valley as it was are saddened by the transformation. Lovers of trees paradoxically will not like the hundreds of thousands that make up Ennerdale Forest: deformed, crowded in a battery, denied light and air and natural growth. Trees ought to be objects of admiration, not pity. Trees have life, but thank goodness they have no feelings else here would be cruelty on a mammoth scale.”

Since his time, and ours too, the landscape has been altered in both negative and positive ways: a disease has killed off the larch trees, their loss opening up the canopy, while the Forestry Commission, no doubt stung by the way followers of Wainwright’s route have amplified his criticisms, has begun a programme of planting native species.

As we walked we could clearly see into the forest – it was no longer an inpenetrable olive wall – while on both sides of the path banks of wildflowers thrived.  Apart from our boots, perfectly in time, the loudest sound was the buzz of bees gorging on the nectar of purple wild orchids, pink campion and daisies, while  the occasional fat dragonfly dined on the midge clouds which accompanied us.

Robin Hood’s again

We talked too.

Deliberately. Conscious of the approaching end of this Coast to Coast crossing.

Recalling highlights and lowlights. Musing together on lessons learned. But I shall save that for another post, since this is already as long as Ennerdale itself.

We reached the lake finally, following the narrow shore path which teeters over tree roots as complex as tangled wool, spreading over and around the rocky path in search of something to fasten onto.

And as we picked our way among the rocks and routes, the scent in the air was of the sea, though that still lay some miles ahead. Perhaps it was no more than our imaginations but with white horses racing across the lakes’ surface, the rich tang of weed, it was a taster of what was to come the next day.

We continued to allow ourselves to stop, despite the deepening day, stripping of  boots and socks to cool our feet in the lake. And to look back towards the head of the valley where clouds were now mustering, darkening the fellsides and, by contrast, intensifying the golden late afternoon sun shining our way home, turning the lake into liquid light.

We were leaving the fierce felltops behind, but only with our bodies. Our spirits remained aloft, drunk as that man Moses on all the beauty we had seen that day; all the awe we had felt, all the peace we had found.

Ennerdale had one final challenge for us: Robin Hood’s Chair, a strange rock promontory jutting out into the lake, where the path effectively disappears and the only way past is by scrambling over its top, with extreme care. Our guide books were silent on the subject of why this obstacle, so remote from Sherwood Forest, is named for the outlaw, but as they point out, it’s a neat connection between the almost start and end of the Coast to Coast walk.

Actually, there was another challenge for two walkers who, after all that road walking through the forest, fully understood the meaning of the expression ‘footsore’: another mile and a half on tarmac to bring us into Ennerdale Bridge, the village.

We have noted often how much longer than a mile is the final mile of any day’s walking. This one went on for ever and the only thing that helped us continue to put one tired boot in front of the other was the thought of sharing a celebratory cider once we reached the village.

We’d arranged to call Barry for a lift back to the car in Cockermouth and he was as good as his word, standing by to get our call and saying it would take him 20 minutes to reach us. The perfect amount of time to buy a cold, cold cider and sit with it outside The Shepherd’s Arms in the sunshine,  looking out towards the fells that had been with us all day, with full hearts and utter satisfaction.