Walking with Plato (9 page)

I recalled that I had felt the same way twenty years previously while walking in the Lake District. I was in my early thirties at the time, and undergoing a crisis of faith.

I had grown up believing that there is a God and a Devil, that Christians go to Heaven while everyone else goes to Hell, that the Bible is right about
everything
, and that one day – probably very soon – Jesus will come again.

Needless to say, I had the occasional pang of doubt about all of this. But up until my late twenties I managed to keep on believing nonetheless. However, as my twenties gave way to my thirties, I found that my doubts had become too big to brush under the carpet any more. I had to face them.

If I could resolve my doubts – and I sincerely hoped that I could – then I could carry on believing. But otherwise . . .

So it was that I found myself, for the first time, questioning the beliefs that had guided every aspect of my life up until then. It was an intensely stressful and confusing time. I was tied up in so many intellectual and emotional knots that I scarcely knew what – or even how – to think. I felt so burdened and distressed that I wondered if I could ever be happy again.

But, in the middle of it all, I took a fortnight’s camping holiday, alone, in the Lake District.

Each day, I would walk through the countryside and allow my thoughts to wander freely. And slowly, surely, and simply, the knots began to unravel. I began to understand who I was and what kind of person I wanted – needed – to become.

Mostly, it was the solitude that helped me to gain clarity. During twenty-odd years in the fundamentalist church, I had acquired a whole host of significant others – pastors, elders, teachers, preachers, house-group leaders, worship leaders, congregation members, friends, and relatives – who all had very strong opinions about who I was and what kind of person I ought to become. With all of their noise and clamour and expectation, I found it impossible to think, or even to feel, for myself. But away from them all, alone in the forests and beside the lakes, I began to discern the beating of my own heart.

Solitude, by itself, though, wouldn’t have been enough. It wouldn’t have brought me the stillness and clarity that I needed. The walking was important too.

There is something about walking – the steady, unhurried rhythm, the gentle stimulation of heart and lungs, and the pleasant synchronization of mind and body – that soothes the spirit and frees the mind.

This is especially true of walking in the countryside, where the quiet beauty of the surroundings soothes the spirit still further, and where the wide-open spaces offer still greater freedom to the mind.

It was during the second week of that camping trip that I discovered Plato.

One of the things that the solitude and the walking helped me to realize was that I needed to widen my intellectual horizons. I needed to expose myself to some new ideas, and start thinking things through for myself.

So, when I saw a battered old copy of Plato’s
Republic
in a second-hand bookshop, I bought it.

I knew nothing about Plato, except that he was an Ancient Greek, and that he was a philosopher. But ‘philosopher’ meant
thinker
 – and that’s what I wanted to be.

So I started at page one, and I read the
Republic
.

It wasn’t what I expected (though I’m not sure what I
did
expect). It turned out to be a dialogue – a play, of sorts – in which the character Socrates discusses the concept of justice with a bunch of other characters.

It was hard work, and I didn’t understand it all. But it excited me anyway, because it exposed me to a whole new way of trying to understand the world.

Socrates and his companions didn’t just
tell
each other what to think. They
reasoned
with one another. They
talked
, and they
listened
, and they
thought things through
.

It was the complete opposite of everything I had ever known. And it was brilliant.

For the rest of the week, I carried that battered old copy of the
Republic
with me, and I walked with Plato.

Plato introduced me to philosophy; and philosophy introduced me to Epicurus, Bertrand Russell, William James, Gensei, Hegel, and all of the other great thinkers that have kept me company ever since.

Walking over Rannoch Moor was a joy, but I had little time to savour it. Not so much because the ten-mile crossing of the moor made up only half of the day’s journey, leaving plenty of ground still to cover, but rather because the Rannoch midges descended upon us in a feeding frenzy whenever we tried to stop or slow our pace.

Having crossed the moor, we walked for nine miles along the floor of the glen to the Pine Trees Leisure Park in the tourist village of Tyndrum. There, for reasons I can’t recall, we splashed out on a ‘hiker hut’ (a wooden shed, complete with twin beds, electrical sockets, and a kettle) rather than pitching our tent.

The next stage of the West Highland Way, a thirteen-mile jaunt through farmland, forests, and riverside paths, from Tyndrum to
Inverarnan
, passed quickly and pleasantly.

As I walked along, not at all focusing on, but nonetheless enjoying, the varied scenery, I found myself musing on what it is about the countryside that is so soothing to the spirit and so refreshing to the soul. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Or, at any rate, I couldn’t put it into words.

I felt that it had something to do with the space, with the openness of the fields and the sky. And I felt that it had something to do with the gentle, almost imperceptible, pace at which things change.

Out in the countryside, you’re part of something bigger, more important, and longer lasting than yourself. So that you get dwarfed by it all. But in a good way.

The British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch expressed it far better than I ever could in her beautiful book
The Sovereignty of Good
:

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then I suddenly observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.

Perhaps all of this explains why so many troubled and depressive thinkers have been avid walkers.

Take the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, for example, a man so messed up and brooding and despondent that I consider myself positively cheerful by comparison.

By the age of twenty-one, he had lost his mother and five of his six siblings. He had a religiously melancholic father who viewed these deaths as God’s punishment for the sins of his youth. He suffered physical problems, including a curved spine and – quite possibly – sexual impotence.

As a young man, he broke off his engagement to a young woman whom he adored, on the grounds that he could never offer her anything like a normal marriage, and then spent the rest of his life mourning for her loss.

As a child he was ridiculed and bullied by his schoolmates, and as an adult he was ridiculed in the Danish press. To cap all of this, he suffered – perhaps unsurprisingly – from severe and chronic anxiety.

He wrote in his journal: ‘The whole of existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation. . . . Great is my distress, unlimited.’

At another time he wrote:

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away – yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit ––––––––––– and wanted to shoot myself.

This is hard-core depression. Yet even a man afflicted with this level of despair was able to draw comfort and consolation from the simple act of walking.

In 1847, in a letter to his niece Henrietta, he wrote:

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk; every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

Or, for another example, take the eighteenth-century Genevan philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In his old age, at the close of a brilliant, but also a turbulent and unhappy life, he took to walking alone in the countryside around Paris.

A sufferer from poor mental health, Rousseau considered himself to have been the victim of jealousy and persecution throughout his life, and had determined to end his days in withdrawal from the society that he felt had so cruelly mistreated him.

In his final work,
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
, which was unfinished at his death, he describes his walks and the ‘flights of thought’ that accompanied them. It is a beautiful and lyrical book: sometimes intensely sad and sometimes wonderfully uplifting; sometimes sharply insightful and sometimes narcissistic and paranoid. To me, it paints a picture of a troubled and suspicious man, who, in his solitary walks, finds a measure of tranquillity and contentment that he could find nowhere else.

He writes: ‘These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day during which I am fully myself and for myself, without diversion, without obstacle, and during which I can truly claim to be what nature willed.’