When Walking, Just Walk

It is hard to keep up with the changing atmosphere of the days at this time of year. Thursday was all new notebook hope. Yesterday I already had the sad dread of the world starting up again. The version of the world which is about to dos, and what you dos, and who you ares, and how you ares, and going out, and meetings and emails, and just a huge amount of stuff. Even though I am lucky enough to love the stuff that I do, and believe in it, still there is this heavy wish in my chest to stay right here, curled inwards, with everyone I love near, safe, and not much of anything in the days. I had to lie down yesterday, under the weight of the wish not to go back to work/ school/ or any version of formal, official Life with a capital ‘L’, even though holidays-ever-after is not my idea of a fairytale ending.

This year, I suppose, there is the added feeling that if I could stay right here, right now, then I would not have to worry about hospital appointments, or blood tests, or biopsies, or illness or wellness or any of it. I could just quietly be here, doing scraps of writing, baking some slightly unsuccessful cupcakes (yesterday), stopping to admire the near-full moon already risen in the daytime sky, accepting an awkward hug from my taller-than-me son.

But somehow the trick is to remember that this is actually all I need to do - to go on quietly being here, writing, baking, hugging, living, loving, and stopping to admire the moon. There isn’t really much more to it, despite the colossal illusion of important stuff to be done, waiting to take over from next week.

In ’24 the leukaemia, and then the first round of chemo for it, stopped me in my tracks more effectively than anything has ever done before. There was a sort of euphoria - maybe a taste of enlightenment - which came with being so weak that I was, by necessity, completely present, because I did not have the energy to be anywhere else. I could only do the one next thing before me - take the next shaky step, then the next, take the stairs one at a time.

There is an acting exercise that Phelim and Lee teach called, ‘when walking, just walk.’ It is a kind of antidote to Stanislavsky. No back story, no acting of any kind, other than to do the thing that you are doing: when sitting just sit; when lifting the cup, just lift the cup. After that first round of chemo, I had no choice but to play this game. Slowly, through the last twelve months I have begun to do more things again - more stuff, more layers of stuff, to the point where I am never only doing one thing: I am walking, while messaging on the phone, while tidying the house, while making mental notes for my next novel, while calling out to my daughter that I will get her a glass of water in a minute. It drives her crazy - because she is fastidious about a minute being a minute, if that’s what I call it, so if the water takes more like ten minutes to arrive, then I have lied to her. I can see her point of view. And I believe that the tiny dose of illness that has come back to me is actually an invitation to play ‘when walking just walk’ again, but to see if I can play it now, while I am well, not wait until I have no choice.

Could I go into the year like this? Could I start up, without starting? The stuff I feel such dread of, would be a lot less ‘stuff-like’ if I only did one strand of it at a time, only the thing that I am doing right now, and nothing else. I work from home; my children do not go to school - I could do one quiet thing after another next week, and the next, and the next. I realise also that the things I love the most - writing stories, climbing ropes - are things that it is very hard to do well if you are trying to do anything else at the same time. Maybe it is why I like them - having the permission to do only that thing, as long as I am doing it.

I even have a fantasy now, as I am writing, that this is all that’s the matter with me, and with those mutant cancer cells - they are just trying to do too much at once, poor things. The cure is very simple - the cure is being simple. When walking, just walk.

Let me try then, to do only the thing that I am doing. It will take tremendous discipline. It is so familiar to me, to all of us, to accumulate, to add more stuff and yet more, and then a little more. Ask my son, who will turn 14 on twelfth night - he has just finished reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years and will explain to anyone willing to listen that adding more and more, until we are crushed under the weight of it, is the only logical conclusion of capitalism. We are officially on the tenth day of Christmas now, which means my true love has accrued ten leaping lords, nine dancing ladies, eight maids, seven swans, six geese, five rings, four calling birds, three turtle doves, two hens, one partridge and one pear tree - a lot of stuff, in other words. How about if I just stick with the pear tree - nothing else - as my gift to myself, and others, all year round? Or how about a single glass of water? When I carry water to my daughter, I will just carry water to my daughter. She might even get it on time.