Sometimes, despite our best efforts, nothing seems to change in life. We feel stuck, and it’s immensely frustrating.
That’s the time to walk. Just the act of putting one foot in front of the other reveals that progress is being made. Also, it’s wonderful to see the incremental changes in the natural world.
At the moment, glimmers of hope in the winter gloom come in the form of snowdrops which suddenly are under many hedgerows and at the end of many a driveway.
When I was a child they did indeed come up through snow and frost, bravely forcing their way through hard ground and sub-zero temperatures to flower. They were not stuck. These days they’re flowering through inches of mud. They are still a welcome sight.
During a break in the rain I walked out of the village, walking the different way round a familiar route. Odd, how I always walk it anti-clockwise, so today I opted for clockwise. Just doing that showed me something that I’d never seen before.
There was a hornbeam tree, which has clearly been there for decades, but which, on my anti-clockwise walk, I’d never spotted.
There were also additional signs of spring, as a row of hazel stands were in full yellow catkin mode, catkins dancing in the strong breeze.
Clearly, I’m a fan of hazel catkins. We share a name. But I like their feistiness, flowering in a tough time of the year, and adding colour when it seems that there is so much grey.
They also remind me of when I rode, rather than walked, traversing ancient woodland on horseback several times a week. Seeing the catkins always gave me a sense that winter was losing its grip, that a magical change was underway and spring would come.
Now, I walk. It is the fate of the bereaved to carry on when those they love (be they human or animal) have died. But walking round the lanes connects me to the seasons as much as riding once did.
Walking back along my clockwise route, I recalled the first time that I walked this way following long hospitalisation. I was re-learning to walk, and was weak and wobbly.
A friend and I walked the route, spending a good hour investigating the hedgerows and trees. So, I was tired as we neared home, and fell into an overgrown storm drain, which, like the hornbeam, I hadn’t spotted.
But I got up and walked home, pleased at my capacity to get up unaided and soldier on. Sometimes, in the stuck times, that’s all we can do: get up, keep walking, and look for the glimmers of hope.