Read Online Walking with Plato by Gary Hayden - Free Book Online Page B

Station. It hadn’t been the most exciting of walks either. But, despite its length and lack of stimulation, it wasn’t unpleasant.
    On the very first stage of JoGLE, between John o’Groats and Inverness, I had found the last few miles of each day dull and painful. By the third stage, on the West Highland Way, I had ceased to find them painful, and found them merely dull. And by this fourth stage, even the dullness had ceased to be an issue.
    Don’t get me wrong. The dullness was still there, to a degree. It just wasn’t a big deal any more. I had adjusted to it. Accepted it. Even begun to embrace it.
    Each day had a predictable rhythm: a mildly tedious start to the morning with the quotidian chore of taking down our camp. Then five or six hours of enjoyable walking with energy levels high. Then an hour’s weary plodding, late in the afternoon. And finally, a congenial evening of food, rest, and relaxation.
    And it was a nice rhythm, consisting of modest highs and lows that flowed seamlessly from one to another like the peaks and troughs of a sine wave. It had a balance about it, and a tranquillity about it. The modest lows offset the modest highs, and the modest highs offset the modest lows. So, in a curious way, it was all good.
    In The Conquest of Happiness , Bertrand Russell suggests that too much excitement may not be a good thing, and that a certain amount of boredom may be a necessary ingredient of a happy life:
    There is an element of boredom which is inseparable from the avoidance of too much excitement, and too much excitement not only undermines the health, but dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure, substituting titillations for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom, and jagged surprises for beauty.
     
    By this stage of JoGLE, I had begun to appreciate what he meant.
    Many of us, nowadays, feel compelled to fill every waking moment of our lives with TV, music, Facebook, text messages, tweets, and smartphone apps. We can’t abide the thought of sitting quietly, even for a moment, with our thoughts. We crave excitement and stimulation, and regard boredom with abhorrence and fear.
    But long-distance walking changed all of that for me. It taught me that periods of mild boredom are nothing to be afraid of. In fact, they can be a good thing.
    On a typical day, I walked for about eight hours. I spent perhaps an hour or two of this listening to music and audio-books, and perhaps an hour or two conversing with Wendy. This left me with at least four hours in which I had nothing to do but walk and think.
    Those quiet hours, free from electronic stimuli, and free from talk, work, and play, were sometimes a little dull. And in the early stages that dullness worried and bothered me. But, as time went by, the worry and the bother faded. I came to regard periods of mild boredom not as an enemy but as a companion – and even as a friend.
    Those long, empty hours were a cold-turkey cure for my addiction to stimulation and distraction. And, although the cure was painful at first, once it had taken effect, I felt liberated. My mind acquired a newfound tranquillity, clarity, and focus.

    The following morning, we packed up our tent, hoisted up our backpacks, walked to the railway station, caught the train back to Falkirk, and then walked ten miles along the Union Canal to Linlithgow .
    I remember little about the walk except that the Union Canal was much prettier than the Forth and Clyde Canal, and that Wendy suffered a couple of hours of agony after being bitten on the inside of her lip by an insect.
    Linlithgow boasts the magnificent ruins of a royal palace, a beautiful little loch, a fine medieval church, and a high street replete with historic buildings. However, all of this passed me by unnoticed. I recall getting my hair cut by a barber who removed my ear hair by setting fire to it, and I recall eating fish and chips out of a box, and that’s about it.
    But, although I have forgotten the day’s