Walking and thinking

 My day usually starts with a walk, especially when there are pressing funerals to write. Some might consider it procrastination, and possibly it is, but it also gives me a chance to sort through ideas and work things out, so when I do sit down at my desk I have a bit of a plan.

Darwin famously had his ‘thinking path’ to work through knotty puzzles. My daughter recently gave me a postcard with this quote by Nietzsche: “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking”. That went straight up on the fridge.  Rebecca Solnit, wrote “I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.” I agree Rebecca, I often talk out loud as I walk, trying out how words might fit together, thinking about structure.  

 Walking keeps me fit, keeps ideas fresh, and much more than that - writing funerals on a daily basis can erode your soul and walking grounds and restores me. Another wise passage from Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit : “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”

It's a delight to walk on a spring morning when  the avine orchestra strikes up. The small birds are a riotous cacophony of woodwind and strings, and the woodpeckers join in with percussion. The cycle of life and death are evident everywhere around me. Aside from the busy birds mating and nest building, today I found a dead fox carcass, a mass of gelatinous frog spawn and a bank of white violets. The primroses are in abundance and the deep green foliage promising wild garlic and bluebells is popping up all over.

 At the beginning of the pandemic a year ago I found a poem by John O’Donohue ‘Time to Be Slow’, which really spoke to me and I used it in several funerals. The poem ends with these lines “If you remain generous, Time will come good; And you will find your feet Again on fresh pastures of promise, Where the air will be kind and blushed with beginning.”

Today the air was blushed with just such a beginning. ….. now I need to get on and write!