We had walked together for years, my friend and I, she a world-class photographer, me a journalist.
We’d walked into refugee camps, Chinese villages, some of the poorest communities in Africa, down dark alleys to interview transgender prostitutes in India, and once, memorably, across the High Atlas Mountains charting the spring migration of the nomadic Berber people.
We had listened to people’s stories and reported them as well as we could. At the end of every walk there was always copy to file and pictures to edit and upload. We did this in tropical downpours, searing heat, and spent hours on flights writing photo captions. Walking was always accompanied by working.
Then recently, on a warm spring day, we met to take her 10-month-old puppy for a different walk. The puppy was honing her skills of ‘leave’, ‘lie down’ and showing her excellent recall. She was the one walking and working.
Unexpectedly, we came across a meadow of cowslips. There were thousands of them stretching as far as we could see and then further, glowing in the sunshine. It was a glorious sight, and one that showed just what the natural world can look like when given the chance, not sprayed or mowed, or built on.
We sat on a bench in the sunshine and just gazed at it, while the puppy had lunch and checked out the many interesting smells around us.
‘What a relief,’ I thought, ‘that we can just sit here and we don’t have to turn in any work in the afternoon. There is no time pressure.’ But I didn’t say it.
‘No-one’s expecting anything of us,’ said my friend. ‘We can just enjoy this. We should do it more.’ She was feeling it too. No deadlines. We had loved what we did, but just once in a while it’s good to be, rather than do.
Ours was a short walk in the end, with quite a long time spent sitting down looking at the cowslips. After all the walks we’d done recording every kind of human suffering, it felt like we’d earned it. And the puppy did very, very well.