Walking with few plans

It can be tempting to be really organised about walks. Maps, advance planning, considering the terrain and what gear to take. If the point is to walk to somewhere, that makes perfect sense. However, for me the point of a walk is often the walk, not the end point.

My preferred approach at the moment is to pick a general direction, and head out of the front door with no map, and no plan. A basic set of gear – waterproof coat, good boots, a drink, a snack, will cover most eventualities.  And then we just go, and see where the fancy leads us. We’ll pick up a path we haven’t walked before, and then just see where it goes. It might not be a safe or viable approach if you’re in a truly wild landscape, but in rural England, you’re never far from a landmark.

The consequences of this kind of walking are several. You get a lot more surprises, although some of them are better than others. You see places you haven’t seen before, and even small discoveries of that sort can be really exciting.  There is a sense of adventure in striking out like this – even in a quiet familiar place. Doing it builds a map inside your head, and knowledge of how the landscape fits together.

I have a fascination with Lost Things. (Bards of the Lost Forest, The Auroch Grove…) Life can leave many of us more lost and bewildered than we like to admit. There’s something very liberating about going out there and getting physically lost and disorientated a bit – we can do that safely enough. A bit lost, and having to find and figure out our way, and then how exciting it is to get that right and make it back to the fields we know… It’s a way of working that builds confidence, and somehow makes the more existential lostness easier to manage.

Learning to be lost outside, learning to look at the sky and the land for suggestions about where to go, learning to orientate ourselves a bit and overcome the fear of lostness, has affects that stay long after we’ve come home. On some level, I still know that the answer to being lost is to get to the top of the next hill, or around that far corner, or to follow a stream. Other forms of lostness start to seem that bit less intimidating.