Category: walking

Unforgiving Minutes and the Tyranny of Time

 

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My mother liked to recite aloud the poems she learned at elementary school in the 1920s. These poems were generally heroic, patriotic, moralistic, meant to be uplifting in a time of post-war depression. Rupert Brooke, then, not Wilfred Owen. And lots of Rudyard Kipling. His famous poem “If” was one of her favourites. The last lines begin:

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…..”

The Unforgiving Minute has dogged me like the grim reaper ever since. What if I don’t fill it? What if I waste a minute – an hour – days – years? What if Things Don’t Get Done? Over the years, I have felt guilty when I’ve been unwell. I’ve developed elaborate “multi-tasking” strategies like typing up party minutes while chatting on the phone AND watching an improving TV documentary; reading books on cosmology while watching less challenging stuff like Midsomer Murders; affecting to meditate while gardening AND working out what’s for dinner. Trying to bake bread while cleaning out the shed and answering emails is why my sourdough is such rubbish. I’ve had “holidays” where each day is planned and packed with minutes full enough to be righteously forgiven. I’ve created endless, bewilderingly enormous to-do lists, for a day, a week, a year. When I’ve finished everything on the list, I tell myself, I’ll have a rest and choose for myself. That never happens. I just start on the next list.

The fashion for having “bucket lists” doesn’t help. Ticking boxes, like bagging Munros, can be fun, but distracts from living and relishing an actual experience. Sure, there are things I’d like to do before I die (Ben Lawers, talking of Munros, to see the alpine flora, if I can find someone prepared to go at my glacial pace and not make me feel like a decrepit numpty for wanting to take all day about it). But I’ve had it with compulsive list-making.

Another much-loved poem at home was A.E.Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees”.

“Now of my four-score years and ten
Twenty will not come again
And take from seventy springs a score
It only leaves me fifty more

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs is little room
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.”

However, as I’ve watched the balance of my years passed to years conceivably still to come tip, and now that I’m well on the light side of time, I observe that each of my remaining springs affords more each year than a tick-box opportunity to enjoy the blossoming of the gean, and all the other flowers in the woods. Savouring the intensity of each moment more than compensates for lack of time.

And what is time anyway? Not what you think it is. At the speed of light, time freezes altogether. I’ve read enough Stephen Hawking to dimly grasp that if I could fire myself way up into space, my unforgiving minutes would get longer, become hours even, to someone watching me through a giant telescope from Earth. But not to me; up there they’d still be minutes, because time only operates from the point of view of the observer. (Or something like that.)

So, as time is not fixed, but wavers around according to the laws of relativity and probably does something completely different on the quantum level anyway, let’s not be tyrannised by it. Let’s have more minutes with no guilt attached when we don’t fill them. More watching the clouds, less time trying to re-create them on canvas. Less grubbing around in borders and beds that will never be weed-free, more lying in the hammock watching the dandelion clocks expand and blow. More love and laughter, less – or no – time spent trying to prove it exists in our lives by frenetically posting the evidence on facebook.

More randomness – more random writing, perhaps, without fretting to meet self imposed blogging deadlines?

Loch Maree

Kipling finishes:

“…yours is the Earth, and everything that’s in it,
And, which is more, you’ll be a man my son.”

Really?? The Earth is not mine, or yours, or Kipling’s. It does not belong to the human species at all. I don’t want to own or master it and nor should any of us – we’re already proving we’re not much cop at that.

And let’s not even get started on Edwardian gender balance!

Not a Tay Bridge Disaster

 

taybridge1In a fright of frustration and indecision you stream from the house. Too much time alone, too many choices, too many restrictions, too much procrastination – poring over maps in search of something new, too much squinting at Google Satellite to find new paths, no decisions made, no enthusiasm kindled.

Just the need to get out, though the day is grey with bubbling clouds and the threat of rain.

Aimlessly through Perth, getting a few messages on the way. Drifting, still without destination, towards Dundee. Missing the road to the towering volcanic hill where the dragon (probably) still resides in his Hole, squatting on his bed of garnets and Perth May maidens. That would have been a good walk. Too late.

Abruptly turning off the dual carriageway to Errol and the Carse – but let’s not repeat the same old paths twisting in and out of the reed beds. Look out for a new sign, somewhere different, something – anything – new. Oh, missed one, wonder where that went, too late, never mind. Suddenly, you’re skirting the edges of Dundee – how about Riverside Park? What all this way for a semi-urban park? Maybe… oh, too late, you missed the turn-off. Guess what, the sun is out – that’s Dundee for you, Sun City, Yes City, smiling streets and sparkling water, and the V&A looking glassy and coolly remote as it strains toward the ocean.

Woops – and you’re on the Tay Road Bridge, heading for Fife. Desperate to walk and you’ve been driving for an hour, so you stop trying to choose and roll up in Wormit, under the shadow of the rail bridge, that eternal prompt for disaster. It’s mid-afternoon, and you skirt the narrow estuarine beach and climb onto the breezy, sunny cliffs of a hitherto unexplored stretch of the Fife coastal path towards Balmerino.

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And the rushing, crossness, dissatisfaction and sense of time wasted starts to recede. You slow down. You breathe more deeply. The dog potters. Through twisted, moss-covered trees, tangled with ivy, ruined boathouses and animal tracks are glimpsed. The city twinkles at you from across the Firth, as wide and blue as the clamoring, exulting East-coast sky.

 

 

 

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A mysteriously stranded and petrified seal basks on the grass, making a seat for warm and heady contemplation of how beautiful the world is, how long the day, even in September, and how fortunate the indecision that led you here.  Steep coast-path steps, down and up; a hedgerow heady with honeysuckle; crackling of dry grass and the twang of boot on stone. Trickling burns through the undergrowth, ferns and moss and fungi in the gloom, then out, out again into the laughing sunshine, up through meadows, down to the lucky houses clutching at the shore.

Later, a forest, a young woodland of oak, rowan and sorry-looking ash, nudging the older trees, and the pines and firs of previous plantings. Shadows flicker between them; dogs explore, accompanied by knowing locals on paths uncharted by Google maps; Kirkton and Balmerino are near.

You circle the village, fine and high above the Firth, and now as you return the sun is cooler, the air relaxed, the forest empty, chilly and very slightly intimidating. You pick up pace. After all, you started late and the nights are drawing in, and the sun is being sucked back west of Dundee.

taybridgememorialBack at the estuarine beach, nearly under the bridge, you notice the memorial to those killed in the  Rail Bridge Disaster. You were in too much of a hurry to see it before. And you stop, and rock to and fro on the tiny jetty, as the dog paddles and sniffs at stones and seaweed.

There was no disaster here today.