I don’t stroll. I don’t meander. Or stop to catch-up. Or walk sipping coffee. I don’t sit on park benches contemplating my fate.
Move fast, talk straight, get it done. Next! #BePatient? Ahhhh, no.
Late March. It’s still fresh, oh so very fresh. I’m marching through the Park at 4 a.m., pre-dawn, usual story. Just another morning on the same path I’ve walked a thousand + times. Pitch black.
Kate Fagan: “You just never f****** know what’s going to happen next in this life—okay?
I walk…
These boots are made for walkin’ And that’s just what they’ll do One of these days, these boots are gonna walk all over you (Nancy Sinatra, 1966)
Nope, I didn’t see it. No sixth sense, no gut intuition, no unconscious memory map of treacherous obstacles.
My toecap catches a large rock, and I’m airborne. Yes, in that split second, it was all in slow motion. Instinctively, the body did respond:
Clutch cameras (PROTECT THE GEAR AT ALL COSTS NO MATTER WHAT DAMAGE TO BODY)
WAIT! Wait just one millisecond. I can’t FACE-PLANT. I twist my right shoulder inward to absorb the blow.
Anna wandered down to the sea. She knelt in front of some of the stone nest houses and peered in. Anna’s life here was, I was coming to see, devoted to paying attention to – or, more than that, being completely committed to – the beauty of the world before her. She seemed to have done it by cultivating an extraordinary form of independence from other people, their values, and their noise. She used every ounce of her willfulness to shut out the world and concentrate on these simple things. More and more, she reminded me of my grandfather. He spent many hours walking his farm and learning about the wild things upon it, like it was the most important work a human could do. Growing up, I’d wanted to be like him. And I was, for three or four years, after I left school. I’d go for walks over the fields; on sunny nights I’d sit with my back against a rock or climb into the lower branches of a tree and watch the world happening around me. I’d spend hours just watching deer or foxes or badgers, or swifts tumbling and screaming through the sky. I’d lie on my back in the grass and watch the swallows hawking after flies round my dad’s cows, or the brown hares playing in the meadows. But somewhere in the years since, I’d stopped being that person. Life was too busy to stand and stare. I became responsible for boring, necessary things. At one point I had three jobs and worked most nights and weekends. D. H. Lawrence once wrote that the industrial age had created a new kind of human, a machine-like man with iron in his soul. I had become one of them. The past few years had been swallowed up by striving. I remembered a friend back home trying to tell me, gently, that I had become almost manic. But the longer I spent with Anna, the more that way of being felt like a sickness I needed to recover from. A new calmness began to settle over me. It was a feeling I had not known since I was a child following my grandfather round his fields.
Anna reminded me that the first rule of living is to live. To see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the world. The more I tuned in, the closer Anna and I were growing as friends. I was beginning a journey back to the person I had once been – and needed to be again.
Book Review: A warming tale of gathering eiderdown in Norway. Shepherd’s Life author trades the Lake District for a remote island just below the Arctic Circle, where he joins an ‘unbreakable’ septuagenarian keeping an ancient family tradition alive.
Book Review in The Guardian: “Duck Tales. The Lakeland shepherd heads to a Norwegian island where eiderdown is harvested to learn lessons about nature and humanity”
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Ours is a dark and chaotic world. We are all in need of lights to follow. On that island I felt I had met someone who had made a life on her own terms. I was increasingly sure that I, on the other hand, had not… And, as the years passed, I began to feel unmoored, like a piece of timber drifting on the current. The feeling grew. I worked long hours trying to succeed in a modern world I didn’t like very much. I’d doubled my salary, and then doubled it again, but rarely felt any satisfaction or happiness… I began to lose faith in the certainties that had sustained me. I was growing less sure, and more confused. My work took me to places where the world was breaking; places that had, until now, survived. I saw children lying under sheets of tin by roadsides, and hospitals in slums plagued with rats and filth. Despair began to follow me home. Birds like lapwings and curlews were vanishing from the skies above our farm. I could no longer see the point in trying to mend our fields when everything around us was so broken. I had once had endless reserves of hope and self-belief, but they were beginning to run out. Some nights I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie anxiously staring at the ceiling. Part of me just wanted to escape. To run away and hide…
I couldn’t stop thinking about the old woman on the rocks. There was something still alive in her that had died in me. I had seen it in her eyes. I needed to go back and work out what it was – the urge was overwhelming. It was like someone had shown me a few lines of a truly great book and then closed the covers tight shut. I had no idea how I might ever get back there…
Seven years passed. Then, one day, I wrote Anna a letter, and sent it to her via the guide who had taken me. I asked if she was still going out to work on the island and whether she might let me visit her, learn about her work, and maybe write about her. I would keep quiet, work to earn my keep, and try to stay out of the way.
Book Review: A warming tale of gathering eiderdown in Norway. Shepherd’s Life author trades the Lake District for a remote island just below the Arctic Circle, where he joins an ‘unbreakable’ septuagenarian keeping an ancient family tradition alive.
Book Review in The Guardian: “Duck Tales. The Lakeland shepherd heads to a Norwegian island where eiderdown is harvested to learn lessons about nature and humanity”
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Andrew, can you end with a family-friendly joke? This was a Louis C.K. joke that Seinfeld told when they were doing a conversation — comedians on comedians. The joke is something like: You know, going on vacation with the family, I put the kids in the car seats. I put my wife in the car. Put the coffees in the coffee holder. I put the bags in the back. I close the trunk. I close my wife’s door. I close the kids’ door. And when I’m walking from my wife’s door to my door, that’s my vacation.
I know exactly the joke you’re talking about. I think about it constantly. It’s so good, and at its core you could say quite mean. That’s the beauty of a joke. It allows us to access these darker thoughts and emotions that we have: He loves his family, but in that moment, they’re safe, and I don’t have to deal with them. We all have that feeling, and then we come back to reality. And that’s what would be awesome: If people get that these things that we’re saying — it’s just what we feel in that little moment, and then we step back.
It was only then I could viscerally remember what faith had felt like—this bright feeling in the nerves, a sense of being porous and airy. Reality was clear.
NY Times Book Review: June 15, 2025 – A Relationship Breaks in Two. So Does the Book That Explains Why.Catherine Lacey’s “The Möbius Book” is both an elliptical novella and a seething memoir. Decoding the connections is at once frustrating and exhilarating.
