The Purpose of Hiking and Spontaneity
by Julie Lancaster View Bio
Walking in capital city the night before boarding the train to our trailhead, I tripped down the curb. With my head swiveling back and forth desperately trying to figure out which way the bloody cars were coming from, I missed the step. The next thing I knew, I was splayed out on cobblestone in the middle of the street. For the next eight days of hiking, I didn’t fall once.
One time, my Orange County dwelling sister asked me “Why do you hike?” It was a good enough question, but I hadn’t really thought deeply about it. I’ve been in outdoorsy circles for most of my life and it’s just what people do. I think I answered something about exercise and nature and exploring.
Now I’m realizing it’s more. While walking The West Highland Way winding through the Scottish Highlands, I realize that a big part of it is being physical. Being a body moving in space and across landscapes is different than how I spend 99% of my time. I live in offices, conference rooms, and my head a lot.
In those daily-life spaces, my time is planned out to the extreme. I might have nine meetings in a day with a precisely calculated break of four or 24 minutes carefully wedged between some. I am not knocking this, as I do love efficiency and focus, but I also love spontaneity. One time, my friend Kym said, “When I met you twenty-five years ago, you were the most spontaneous person I knew.” She knows how scheduled I generally am these days.
At work, I am often exploring “what we mean.” What do we mean when we say leadership? Being strategic? Good communication? Scratching beneath the surface of the concept of spontaneity, and I think it’s closely tied to creating fun. I feel like the best version of me when I am making up a new game with people who love me for it and are willing to go along. I think spontaneity means riding the moment with enough breathing room for choice. It includes equal parts flexibility and desire. On this 100-mile trek, Erin and I have hours each day to talk or not, stop or not, explore towns or not, keep a sweaty pace or not, laugh or not, and meet other walkers or not.
We met a guy who is currently a taxi driver in the land where Hagrid’s Hut scenes were filmed in Harry Potter, and is a bounty hunter who hunts 650 deer each year and gets paid per head at the processing plant. He’s only had venison three times in his life.
We met another person who has been a missionary in Zambia near Victoria Falls for the last 19 years who hails from Chicago. She wanted to meet a cute Scotsman in a kilt resembling Jamie in Outlander.
We met a Bostonian who just quit her job as a senior vice president for an investment firm and, for the last five years, has competed in international ballroom dancing competitions. She will go to India from Scotland to visit her aging father.
We take the opportunity to lay down in the moss, stop into little charity shops (thrift shops), put our feet into the lakes, and curl up in a twin bed to watch a movie on my laptop. We wake up each morning in place so different from the previous day, some with bathtub and towel warmers and chocolates on the pillows and “drying rooms” for our wet gear and endless piles of fresh croissants, while in other accommodations, we could barely fit our luggage into the room, found a toad under the bed, and were surrounded by hundreds of kitschy figurines. We loved every moment.
Each morning, Erin would ask “Feel like going for a walk today?”
Yes. Yes. Yes.
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