Ups and Downs - Hiking England's Coast to Coast Way: Landscape, Laughter and Love - page 38

to explore unsuspected paths and discover new skills and satisfactions. My limited vision
had not precluded a rich life, but it had nonetheless exacted compromises. I had treasured
a hope that walking the Coast to Coast would not have been one of them.
My tablecloth of promise had not been ironed, pristine, but it had been wrinkled, creased
and stained. This observation is true of course of all but the most charmed of lives. Re-
jection, disappointment, failure, betrayal are common enough, they may even heighten the
pleasure of calmer times. Nevertheless, in Western culture we often pretend it isn't so.
We get conditioned somehow to esteem positive attitudes, independence, prosperity, suc-
cess; we enshrine very gifted people, high achievers, and tend to forget that another kind
of giftedness, achievement, success grows from the courage and tenacity that sometimes
come from setbacks, reversals, pain and loss. I occasionally speak of my experience in
Yellowstone National Park many years ago. We visited Yellowstone the winter after a fire
had ravaged the park. It was an iridescent day with a crisp blue sky, a virgin frosting of
snow, everything shining except the blackened trunks of trees silhouetted against the snow.
There was an extraordinary, stark beauty even in the contrast. Perhaps it was to do with
raw power, the unleashing of fire, as it had been when the fighter jets screamed through
the Lake District. In the distance, perched proprietarily on a charred trunk was a magni-
ficent bald eagle. It was a stunning sight. Out of the destruction, I witnessed superlative
power and grace. I would not have been able to see the bird had the canopy grown tall.
With a strange irony, I would not be able to see it now, since my eyesight has faltered, but
its glory is etched into my memory. The phoenix can only emerge from the embers. Pain
sometimes ushers in wonder. This is the way I usually encourage myself to ponder what
hidden opportunities my new partially-sighted way of life has uncovered, what gifts have
come from the destruction of those retinal cells; but pain is nonetheless pain and we can't
always philosophize it away. Today, hurting and disappointed, I could see no eagle, no talis-
man of hope, no promise of unspeakable beauty. Today, my disappointment at my failure
to walk threatened to catapult me into the vortex of regret at the failures and betrayals of
my life. I once thought that occasionally allowing myself to drown in my disappointments
was a peculiar failing of mine, but I have since met many others who have trouble keeping
the ways they have been victimized in perspective. Over the years I have done some work
with prisoners, none has suggested that they were innocent of their crimes, but many have
not been able to break free of the hold past abuses have had on them. Most of us may not
have suffered serious abuse in the way some of these men have, but often we don't honor
the pain of real grief and loss and deny that normal mourning is part of the healing process.
When we've skipped the mourning, hurts and disappointments can well up and suck us un-
der when we least expect it. This was something I was learning in my life and on this walk.