“Choose a piece of writing you’ve always liked and bring it next week,” was the instruction.
Alfred Wainwright’s description of Scafell Pike was my selection.
“This rough and desolate summit is just as it should be and none of us would want it different.”
Some of my earliest memories are the books that taught me words at nursery. I’ve loved reading for as long as I can remember, so it was hard to pick out a single piece, be it poem, lyric or prose, from thirty-odd years of choice.
I’ve only read one of Wainwright’s guides to the Lakeland Fells, but his language stood out at the time and has stuck with me for the last eleven years, evocative of what I experienced the day I climbed England’s highest mountain. His words flowed in a way that my feet didn’t over Scafell Pike’s punishing scree.
Amid the chaos of this October there was a niche of calm and creativity too. A small group of us did a four week writing workshop, as an event in the Up Men programme and on the theme of ‘what now?’. Our task in the third week, using the piece of writing we’d brought along, was to create a ‘golden shovel’ poem where the words of the piece form the final word of each line.
It was a peculiar and unfamiliar exercise, not at all easy. As I chipped away at the first few lines, drafting and redrafting thoughts and phrases, looking for a start I was happy with, one word stuck out above the others.
Summit.
I thought about the summit of a mountain. I thought about how the summit of a mountain is called a peak, even though reaching the top is not the end of the journey, is not the whole of the achievement.
The ‘peak’, the growth, only occurs after; when you return to the foot of the hill and reflect on the challenge; when your body can recover and repair and grow and your mind can recharge, expand and shine with the confidence of completing one thing and thinking about another.
And then I thought about a summit as a gathering of people. Usually it means meetings of heads of state. None of our commanded governments, but our meeting deserved a name, deserved celebration. The fact that we were able to get into a room together at all, but also that we shared thoughts, feelings, ideas, perspectives and words, and we listened and felt richer because of it.
We are not heads of state and nobody will change anything based on what we said or wrote, but still it felt like a summit; an ascent to creativity to remind us of what can be achieved when people commune, share, listen and explore what the events of the year have meant individually.
Like the summit of a mountain, the workshop was not the whole of the journey. There is a descent to navigate, through the lockdown sequel, but the growth we’ll feel from scaling the heights in the first place means our true peak is what comes next, what comes as a result of what we have just experienced.
What is the lure of a mountain? This
is the question. The grassy foothills and rough
scree? The thigh-burning climbs and
knee-buckling descents? The desolate
fields of boulders that disguise a summit?
To reach the top is
not to experience the peak, for the top is just
half the job. Your breath, as
each blow shatters on the wind, feels like it
can’t give more; the last upward step should
be the pinnacle. But to be
human is to grow emotionally and
the act of getting to the destination is none
of what it means to do the journey in the first place, none of
what it means to return having tried in the first place. For us,
our destination was thoughts we would
have thought anyway. Writing has been our journey; to want
to share and listen, that has been the true peak of it.
We tried it, grew from it, and look forward to the next one; not the same, different.