Stumbling on empty in
the dark.
Audio:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UCINzGkiIqwbDNXxGfrtU3GXNPIqaVy8/view?usp=drivesdkThis is coming out a few days early as it is exactly a year ago, as I write this evening, that I was pushed to my physical and emotional limits entirely through my own fault. I was half way through the Three Peaks challenge, had started up Ben Nevis in the pre dawn and then picked up my good pal Bill Adair in Glasgow who drove me down to Scafell Pike. I clambered quickly up the peak as everyone else was coming down and summited in thick cloud as evening drew on. .I took the wrong path down and realised this fairly quickly but assumed it was a path I had seen on the way up which would join the main path. By the time I realised it was not going to do that I was in an entirely different part of the area. What followed then was 4 hours traverse over rough bog land and boulder slopes, two hours of which were in pitch darkness as I tried to make my way back to the car park. Unfortunately the specialised Three Peak map I was using had the Summit area blown up and superimposed onto the very terrain that I was trying to navigate across.
The cockiness and “I’m 52 and still got game” attitude at the summit was quickly replaced by a deep bone weariness, rapidly emptying physical reserves and anxiety that I may not find my way back in the dark. I’ve rarely been so depleted and so far from where I needed to be and I don’t think I’ll ever forget that sense of being at the edge of my limits. As I write this in the comfort of my study with my old brass reading lamp and antique desk I am reminded how quickly circumstances can change. How an overblown confidence or unwarranted optimism can lead to errors and poor decisions with serious consequences. I had no one to blame but myself…map and compass were in my bag and I could have double checked I was taking the right path as Scafell is notorious for folk taking the wrong path off a very confusing summit area. But no, I was on a roll, I was convinced this was the right route and when I realised it wasn’t , rather than face the pain of re-climbing what I had come down I assumed that if I kept going forward all would work out for the best eventually.
There are times in our lives when we feel the twilight moving in and we feel far from home. .We are unsure what lies ahead in the night we see coming. If we are honest with ourselves much of the fault is our own from not paying attention to the warning signs, not taking time to read the map and compass, whatever that may mean for us. Even now I remember the slow sense of despair that grew as ridge after ridge did not reveal the path I was sure would be there and the twilight deepened relentlessly into dark. Perhaps you have that sense about something in your life that is an accumulation of lots of small choices or perhaps a couple of really big but stupid ones that were made in the heat of the moment. Or conversely by being too passive for too long, drifting with things like we do. We find ourselves in a place we never ever thought we would be and the sense of despair or whatever you feel is starting to creep in from the edges of your soul.
Perhaps it is all circumstantial and you are truly innocent of any responsibility for your predicament. I have an old friend who after a long and distinguished life is just absolutely worn out by the whole thing and is literally fading away to the extent that I didn’t recognise him in the hospital. He’s done in, defeated by the burdens he has carried in his later years…stumbling on empty as the dark closes in. Some of his old spark returned when I borrowed from our common love of the Ancient Greeks the tale of Ulysses fighting through despair again and again.
And for me the hand of friendship waited in my old pal Bill at the car park and two hours later my wonderful daughter Abi who we picked up at Kendal and who got me up Snowden in the morning. We are not meant to be alone and that is something that stumbling on empty in the dark taught me.
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