Last weekend Mandy and I were walking in the fells with two new friends. They aren’t regular hill goers and we had never been out with them before. Also, it’s January, with wet snow up high and a powerful easterly wind. There’s a section of the path near the top of Ruddy Ghyll in Borrowdale that goes along the edge of a big drop. Our friends looked uneasy. Up till that point they had been walking along like perfectly competent bi-peds but were decidedly put off by the prospect of continuing along the path near the gaping edge of the ghyll.
At first, they thought of going further away from the path but the ground there would involve snow covered slippery rocks and then there was the impulse to crouch and use hands for balance. It wasn’t that the path itself had narrowed or become slippery or unstable, it was just the knowledge of the edge. But all was made instantly well by five reassuring words from Mandy,
“It’s simple” she said—"Just walk normally.”
“Oh, okay, yes, we can just walk normally.”
Which they did with no trouble at all.
Two days later the boot was on the other foot as I had a meeting with one of these same friends in the context of her advising me on the new play I’m working on. It became clear during the conversation that I had some unhelpful preconceptions about the theatre work I want to do. I don’t write fiction, all my work is based in unstaged, messy real life. I am not, by training, an actor and god forbid that I were even to start thinking about any kind of song and dance. And yet I had a notion that I must be something more than me when I’m on stage.
“Well yes, of course”, says my wise mentor, “there are things about breathing and voice and engaging people—you know that. But you need to listen to what Mandy said—'just walk normally’. If you’re saying you want to be authentic then that’s what you’ve got to be. You know how to do that, just like I know how to walk.”
And so, Mandy’s wisdom had stuck with us, and has become a helpful metaphor for me (or is it an aphorism, or perhaps both?) Whether it’s the edge of a cliff or a live audience, or anything else that concerns me, there’s no need to turn that concern into unnecessary unhelpful behaviour. Fear driven responses can be self-defeating. If the path is sound then—just walk normally.
And in the present way of things, where media is hard to escape and is full of the foretelling of the nearness of a great abyss, I think it’s easy to feel under threat. Of course, the cliff edge is real. Climate change, tech dystopia, the end of democracy, the possibility of nuclear Armageddon. I’m not saying we should carry on our sweet way and ignore the dangers. But acting only from fear, cowering or crawling, or trying to pretend that we are something we’re not, will not help.
Time for a bit of Mary Oliver I think—when is it not? Mary Oliver was a poet who learned a lot from the non-human beings around her. In her poem ‘When I am Among the Trees’ she imagines the trees speaking to her…
“It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
It amazes me that I have these people to turn to, Mandy, Mary Oliver, and my new friend. They all agree that life is not simple but what we can do is often simple—walk normally, go easy, be filled with light and shine.
