logo

dr-james-hawkins

  • icon-cloud
  • icon-facebook
  • icon-feed
  • icon-feed
  • icon-feed

Walking in Glen Affric: lifestyle & aging (second post)

Well here I am, eight or so miles up Glen Affric, lying in a little one man tent in the rain.  I'm 59 today.  I woke at 2.30am wanting a pee and murmured a quiet "Happy birthday" to myself before choosing a moment between showers to stumble out to relieve myself.  I could see a few stars through the clouds.  Since then it's been raining pretty much every time I've woken.  So comfortable, toasty in a sleeping bag on a self-inflating mat in this beautifully designed Hilleberg Akto tent.  Amazing.  I came in on a mountain bike yesterday along the Forestry track south of the loch, bumping and occasionally having to get off to push the bike ... but such an improvement on walking and having to backpack in all supplies, tent, sleeping things - everything I need for three days.  It would have been heavy and slow to have carried it.  As it was, I arrived pretty quickly and pretty easily.

Packhorse

Walking in Glen Affric: adventure and connection (first post)

I'm at my friend Larry's flat in Glasgow.  We're doing one of our three-to-four monthly check-ins -  reviewing and planning how our lives are going.  I arrived here from Edinburgh yesterday evening and we spent time catching up and looking ahead.  This morning though, when I woke, I found it hard to think clearly about the time between now and early August when we next plan to meet like this.  The mountains of Glen Affric are beginning to grow closer and fill my immediate field of vision.

Holiday, friendship and “meditation retreat” (seventh post)

And here's a briefer seventh Moroccan post looking a little at the internal "meditative methods" being used by various of us in the desert.

Following the camels

So at the lunch siesta today I asked our group what they had been doing in their heads while they were walking.  One person talked about simply "being with the walking and the breath".  They're a dancer and spoke of "dancing with the wind".  They said something too about "headlessness".  That took me back to the Incredible String Band and their 1960's song about Douglas Traherne Harding who lectured on "headlessness".  I remember staying the night at Douglas's home nearly 40 years ago!

Exercise & light

“ A bird will drop frozen from a bough without once having felt sorry for itself. ” - D.H. Lawrence

This section links to resources for exercise and for using light therapy.  Exercise is an absolutely key component of what this website is primarily about - achieving improvements in our stress, health and wellbeing.  Try, for example, clicking on this exercise tag to see a series of relevant blog posts.  The gains from exercising more are so huge that they have major implications for government health budgets - unfit populations get sicker and cost much more to look after.  It's no surprise then to find that there are many excellent, nationally developed, internet sites giving high quality exercise information.   

Third day of the "walking retreat"

Saturday morning, the Frigate Café, Ullapool. This is a great cafe. Catero (my wife), Kieran (my son) and I were here last autumn when we came up for a long weekend. Kierie, who's in his 20's,

First full day of the "walking retreat"

I wrote a post at the beginning of the week entitled "Looking ahead to the walking retreat".  Now it's happening - Thursday morning 6.30am.  It takes some effort of will to emerge from the only-just-warm-enough sleeping bag, put on more layers of clothes and bring this little computer back to bed. I haven't used this one man tent - a Hilleberg Akto - on an expedition before and I'm still very much learning about headroom, storage space and other essentials. Same goes for this little Eee PC computer I'm typing into.

Syndicate content