Still Alive

There's a particular kind of surrender that nobody warns you about. It doesn't arrive with drama or announcement. It creeps in quietly, like damp through old walls, (my house to be exact), and before you know it you've stopped reaching for things. Not because you can't. Because somewhere along the way you decided that reaching was for other people. Younger people. People with more time.

I went for a walk the other day. Orihuela to Caravaca de la Cruz, it's about a hundred and twenty kilometre walk through the heart of Murcia, a five or six day pilgrimage on foot. I use that word deliberately. Caravaca is one of the five holy cities of Christendom, home to Vera Cruz, and the route that leads to it has been walked by pilgrims for centuries. I know something about pilgrimage. Thirteen years ago I walked the Camino de Santiago, and that journey changed the way I understood distance endurance, and sheer bloody mindedness, and myself. This felt like a natural continuation. Another road. Another reason to keep moving.

I set off on day one at quarter to seven in the morning while the air was still cool and the world hadn't quite woken up yet. For those first hours it was glorious. The kind of walking that reminds you why you walk, the rhythm of it, the silence, the slow unfolding of the landscape as the light came up over the huerta.

Then midday arrived, and with it the heat.

If you've never experienced a June afternoon in the Segura valley, it's difficult to explain. It doesn't just warm you. It presses down on you. It gets inside your plans and quietly dismantles them, along with my hair which is now plastered to my puce coloured face. But before the heat won the argument, something else happened, one of those small moments that pilgrimages seem to specialise in.

Near Beniel I fell in with three locals on the road. My stomach had been making had been making it's feelings felt for some time. I normally eat breakfast early. So I asked if they knew anywhere I could get something to eat. They nodded, gave me directions, sent me on my way. I followed their instructions and found the place without trouble.

It was a breakfast club for pensioners.

I sat down, ordered food and coffee, looked around at my fellow diners, and had to laugh. Here I was, the pilgrim, the person on a grand journey of physical and spiritual endeavour, and the road had delivered me, with perfect comic timing to exactly where it apparently thought I belonged. There is a kind of wisdom in that, if you're willing to accept it with good grace. Which of course I was. Both the coffee and tostadas were excellent and good value. There has to be an upside to being a pensioner.

I made it to Murcia that day. Twenty five kilometres, the first stage done. Then the heat made its final case and I listened. Wrong time of year. Not quite fit enough. I called it there.

Not defeated. Recalibrated.

Because I'll go back. Nearer winter, when the air has cooled and the afternoons have lost their ferocity. I'll get fitter between now and then. I'll walk all hundred kilometres, all five or six days, and I'll arrive in Caravaca the way pilgrims have arrived for centuries. I will be tired, grateful, and changed by the road.

If you want to do nothing, be magnificent at it. Sit in your chair, watch the light move across the wall, let the afternoon pass without apology. There is no shame in genuine rest.

But if something in you stirs, and something in me clearly does, then stop pretending it isn't there. Age doesn't and should not cancel curiosity. It deepens it. The capacity for wonder, for stubbornness, for setting off before sunrise with a pack on your back and a hundred kilometres ahead of you, that doesn't expire. Nobody collects it at the door.

I didn't make it to Caravaca. Not this time. But I made Murcia, on foot, in the June heat. One stage out of six. A beginning, not an end.

And somewhere between Orihuela and Beniel, three strangers on a road pointed me toward a table full of pensioners and a very good coffee. The pilgrimage, it turns out, has a sense of humour.

Come winter, I'll be back on that road.

Keep going

.