Learning about spirituality on the West Highland Way (pt 5)

I realise I write nothing in my paper journal yesterday. It really was just a matter of keeping going, and there were no places which invited me to pause and scribble. With our arrival in the glens today a more leisurely day was promised, even if the distance was the same.

Last summer, walking in the Dolomites, our tour guide wouldn’t show us a map as he felt it might discourage some of the less confident walkers. Yesterday, I found myself checking my map on my phone to make sure I was on the right path, but I deliberately avoided doing so when I felt I was in one of those “are we nearly there yet?” moments.

It was a relief to be able to go at the pace my legs felt capable of sustaining. This got me thinking about how one’s sense of time changes. There are fixed points in the day; breakfast and the deadline for getting bags into the place for them to be collected, but most of the day becomes divided much more loosely - around lunchtime (I should be about half-way) or mid-afternoon (I ought to be getting close to my hotel for the night). This feels very different from the more common sense in which time is a commodity in short supply, or is the cause of so much pressure (the tyranny of the urgent). When walking, time becomes the rhythm of the day.

In the Incarnation, God allows himself to be subject to time, but he is unbounded by it, whereas we can never achieve this. In the Garden God chose his time, he walked in the cool of the day. I pondered how we might take this idea of time as a rhythm rather than a dictator into the busy and time-dependent life of ministry. When walking it is as if our heart and lungs and our legs are working in harmony, not like running where you eventually have to stop because they are inherently out of kilter.

The landscape has changed notably from the previous days. The clouds loom and hide the tops of the surrounding hills, but the way feels open and gently undulating in comparison to the treachery of the shores of Loch Lomond.

Just before stopping for lunch I reached the Crianlarich crossroads, the half-way point on the West Highland Way. Time and miles pass, even in this “out of time” few days.

I talk to the Americans again as we leave our lunch spot; two couples and a divorcee. I am cemented into their friendship group as I am privileged to the complexities and happenstance of their friendship.

We walk together through pine plantations, but I become aware that I could do with spending a penny before too long. I speed up in order to give me some space, but then find myself abruptly walking out of the plantation into a huge open area of felled pines. I scramble over the bank, hoping to make use of the last bit of woodland, only to find a couple of bicycles leaning on a tree. I decide to brave the next hour or two walking, hoping to reach the B&B before I become too uncomfortable, so scrabble back over the bank. And then, somewhat bizarrely, out on the trail I bumped into someone I had last seen in 2005. Such is the serendipitous nature of life constrained by time.