West Highland Way planning (Part 4)

Travel Day -1 arrives and I need to pack.

There is plenty of advice about the 10 C's necessary for survival, but I hope to do more than simply survive! Having said that my packing also has to be within the limits of what I can carry and be transported. Additionally, I want to explore something of what the Desert Monastics meant by withdrawal. Anthony, the first real exponent of the solitary life in the desert, did not see this as a complete cutting off from the world; he took part in the most important theological debates of his day and ministered to those who came to seek his wisdom. We have a joke in the house that whenever I go away something happens; the power goes off, or there is an important admin matter to be dealt with, and so it is important for me to be able to keep in touch with home. Our phones are now also important means of accessing maps etc, and so that means a healthy boundary needs to found to fence off the usual external interruptions as well as internally falling into the distractions of YouTube and Wikipedia. That will be a valuable lesson to learn and bring home with me.

John Climacus places haplotes, by which he means simplicity and meekness, at the 24th step (out of 30) on his Ladder of Divine Ascent, which places this at quite an advanced stage in development, suggesting these are amongst the harder things to get right. This sense of holding lightly to "stuff" allows the things which are of ultimate value to become more conspicuous and prevalent. It may even become tempting to tick off the rungs on Climacus' ladder so as to bask in the sense of achievement but, as Lane reminds us,

The spiritual practice isn't the success one achieves in the end, but the process itself.

We might romanticise that for those who went out into the desert wilderness to find the solitude they needed to allow them to fully commune with God, that they could easily leave all responsibilities behind, but that seems not to be quite as cut and dried as we might like to think. Certainly for us, our complex society brings the expectation of our being permanently "plugged in". The challenge, therefore (for most of us), is not how to step away from these things, but how might we hold them at such a distance that we are not being so constantly interrupted from ourselves and the time we need to take with our environments and with God for, as John Chryssavgis puts it,

Detachment is not the inability to focus on things, material or other; it is the spiritual capacity to focus on all things, material and other, without attachment.

I ponder my fortune that, despite thinking about travelling light, I have enough clothes to ensure I can put a clean, dry ones on each morning and enough cash to be able to ensure I find a decent meal each evening.

Comments

[Karen Stocks]

My husband Simon Stocks, who you will remember from training at Trinity, passed on the link to your blog. I am going to walk the Highland Way solo (my first solo hike) at the end of the month. I have found it interesting to use your experience to prepare for this. I am finding my reflections from 'Backpacking with the Saints' by B.C.Lane (mentioned in your first post) particularly thought provoking. Thank you for sharing.