Let’s see what is
This morning, I am sitting in the garden of West Winds Cottage in Buckden. The garden is English in all the ways we’ve both read about and now seen with our own eyes: manicured tufts of lavender, flowering shrubs, border plants, potted flowers in cascading tiers, and climbing roses everywhere. There is a small lawn with half-size picnic tables, at one of which I now sit with a quickly cooling cup of tea.
Yesterday, walking the 12-1/2 miles from Grassington to Buckden, Steve and I continued to perfect this new way of navigating—a guidebook containing highly detailed descriptions of our walking route (“Here, you will pass a stone barn on your left, and a stile straight ahead. Though it might look tempting, ignore the good track to your right and carry on through the stile and cross the next 2 fields diagonally, passing through 2 more stiles at the stone walls.”), aided somewhat by a map of each stage of the day’s journey.
It would be an egregious omission if I didn’t tell you that we have gotten a little lost more than once. We have our different ways of approaching this: Steve, first and foremost, refers back to the guidebook. This is a solid plan. The writer has not been wrong once, and so has proven that she is a reliable source. Given the data, re-reading her instructions is surely the best course of action. For my part, I look around (which can be highly distracting here. In every direction, the views are breathtaking!). In many cases there are paths leading in several directions, but a look just beyond where we are may reveal a landmark that makes the way ahead clear.
More often than not, combining these two approaches gets us on the right track. Until it doesn’t. Our first day walking found us in a field filled with sheep, so much like the last 50 or so we’d already passed through that it wasn’t really any wonder that our tired selves would start to blend them all together. Steve was sharing his latest theory on how golf was invented (shepherds hitting sheep turds out of the way with sticks, which eventually led to seeing how far one could hit a turd, with extra points for landing it directly in a rabbit hole. Please don’t Google this and ruin it for me!), when we realized our surroundings weren’t quite matching up with our guidebook. With so many identical landmarks—stone barns, stone stiles, stone walls, stone cairns—it’s easy to force the instructions to match what’s right in front of you (raise your hand if your an ex-employee who has patiently weathered my treatise on how navigating the Christmas season as a chocolate maker is much like navigating the Alps with a map of the Andes). Long story short, the incorrect map may still get you to the right place. However, every so often we have to check our compass to make sure we’re going in the right direction. We were not.
After exhausting our two approaches, we laid out our OS Explorer map on the soft grass and backtracked our route in hopes of seeing where we may have gone wrong. On a tiny dot in the last village I saw the possibility of a wayward turn (where we may have been distracted by a “kissing gate”). If that was indeed where we veered off course, then it looked as if we’d gone about a mile in the wrong direction. From where we were, there was really no way to be sure except to go back and see—an option so unappealing after having already walked 13 miles, I could nearly weep. And this is when i thought of our friend Ted, who’s wise words inspired the title of this post.
Ted says everyone’s first job is “to see what is.” (His daughter Eliza writes about this beautifully on Ted’s Caring Bridge site: ‘What a painter. And a vital part of this is not looking away when there are hard things to be seen.’)
On my knees, amid the sheep dung and thistle, crouched low over an oversized map of the Western Dales, and wanting desperately to match my immediate surroundings with the correct place on the map, I thought of Ted and willed myself “to see what is.”
We returned to the kissing gate, and trod right, instead of left, and were rewarded (eventually) with a cold pint, a hot meal, and a soft bed.
And here’s another thought: “what is” is always right here. Right in front of us. It can be bad. It can be good. It can be desperately sad, too. We are thinking of Ted so often on this walk that sometimes it feels as if he’s right here with us. I’d like to think he is in a way, nearing the border of this journey and his next. I think I know what Ted might say about our little misadventure. I think he’d tell us that any journey that brings you by a kissing gate—not once, but twice—is a journey worth an extra mile or two.
