Blossoms
Spring in London. Blue and white and pink and green. Air thick with pollen and vapour. A rush to learn the names of different birds and ornamental cherries. Spring is a wonderful time to have a newborn baby in the house, a sense of renewal and excitement and joy.
I am different this time around. I think it’s in no small part due to the power of walking, of commitment to a single thing day-in day-out and the way such a process grounds you. I have spent almost three months now walking my route through a few parks near my house, usually in the mornings. I have felt my body shed weight and gain fitness and strength.
The Pool and Ravensbourne rivers, banked by concrete but at least surrounded by a strip of greenery a mile long which is my favourite part of the route, are flowing, awash in birdsong and blossom petals. When I began my walking regime, in the dead of winter and mostly as a startled response to post-Christmas gluttonous weight gain, there was frost on the dormant blackberry bushes most mornings. Today it is going to be 18 degrees and my sleeves are short.
I joined a walking group last year to try to meet some like-minded folks, inflicted with the same insanity as me, obsessed with the transformative and meditative power of the putting of one foot in front of the other tens of thousands of times. I was not particularly surprised to discover most of the folks were highly eccentric and lonely. Of the groups of twenty or thirty people I walked with almost all were single and I did not meet another walker with children.
I can’t stop thinking about two things these last few days: the Red Hand Files and the Maggie Smith poem I linked to yesterday. For myself and many others, personality is split between an outward facing individual who interacts with the world, forms relationships, receives data from stimuli, experiences things, and an inward-facing one who processes it all and searches and synthesises it for meaning and beauty. Cave so eloquently describes the delicate and often tragic balance that must be kept between these two halves of the self when one has a family. Smith’s inward facing self desperately cries out to exist, to be heard, to leave a trace in the physical world.
Everyone I encounter on my walk this morning is alone in their own world, most with headphones in, walking or running, soon to be back in their more complicated realities. There is one older couple, holding hands, showing their children the blossoms on FaceTime.
Photographs
- A tree blossoming in the River Pool linear park in Catford, London.
- The River Pool.