Welcome

Man plans, God laughs. I think that’s a Yiddish proverb, and it’s a fun thing to turn around in your mind like a beautifully-made puzzle that may also be a finger-trap. I like it because it reminds me to keep my eye on the fine grain of life in the present – of puddles and pebbles and clouds of breath and swelling birdsong and cloud-watching and the smell of things and all the other stuff that will make up 99% of our lives whether we notice them or not.

I like it too because it brings to mind a good-humoured God, or at least the wry detachment we should try to have from the successes or failures of our carefully-laids.

That’s an attitude it’s much easier to have after a walk. Right now I like it because it acknowledges the great role the unplanned and the scarcely-meant can play in our lives. Like the sleeping fox in the long grass of a field edge I came across last lockdown, or the great tit whose routine my morning walk has coincided with and with whom I now get quite close. It reminds me too of scenes from walks in national parks with my parents, moments many of which they don’t remember, but which have become touchstones of beauty or triumph or relief for me. Most of my standout memories are connected by walking in fact – the ones from those great storehouses of beauty and opportunity that are national parks, and the ones a few minutes from my front door.

Walking has precipitated so many of the pleasures that would otherwise have passed me by, and in lockdown it’s stopped so many days just falling into the imprint of the last.

One day I will walk in National Parks again. Every day will I walk to feel reconnected to all that’s good in life again.