I remember as a child my Grandmother and others would always say things to me like 'count your blessings' or 'be thankful for what you have'. As a child, that didn't really make too much sense if I'm honest and it's only recently that I have started to realise what these sentiments were actually supposed to achieve. In life we are encouraged to have things, to want things and to desire the things that we do not have but others do. Some people desire fast cars, big houses and boats where others just want to be as happy as the next happiest guy they come across. The feeling of not having the thing you want & desire can be so strong it can take control and steer you on trips down paths that you would never have taken voluntarily. It's all relative however and the desire of a refugee trying to enter the country illegally, risking life and death is much different than that of the desire for a designer handbag which leads the banking executive to work unethically. The net result however is the same in that until the desire or the need is actually met then there will be a element of suffering for the individual concerned and the attempts to relieve the suffering of desire will continue at all costs. No matter what way you tend to look at these things, desire itself is a form of suffering and the more stuff you desire the more discontented with life you will be. The small amount of gratification that comes when desires are 'fixed' can usually just be a temporary high whilst the next round of desire is conjured up by our economic overlords and the directed TV advertising that convinces us all that things would be so much better if only we took that credit card and went out and bought that new big screen TV.
Whilst working in many large corporations over the last 23 years I've seen all sorts of manifestations of the desire & suffering behaviour but have always struggled to put my finger on exactly what it was that I was witnessing and why it made me uncomfortable with the environments and the people who it affected. I'll be the first to admit that I was probably the corporate model employee who looked for bonuses and pay rises and did my best to crawl to the top of the heap in order to reap the rewards in order to fulfil the need and desire that my upbringing taught me - 'be smart, earn lots of money and have a happy life'. The last few years however have been a much different story for me and it was a simple exercise of looking outside of the central belt of Scotland that changed my perceptions of the world for ever. I've lived in Scotland my entire life although I have worked for periods in the US, Indonesia, England and in various spots across Europe. I've seen a lot of the world and have spent a lot of time in the Alps and the US rockies and at some point I thought I had a finger on the pulse of nature and was appreciative of the finer side of life. On reflection the pampered ski trips and luxury holidays abroad were just another manifestation of desire and the need to cluck about ski exploits where things were so extreme or how great a hot country was. I wouldn't have missed these trips for the world but I do now realise that they didn't make me happy, they just seemed to fill a bit of a gap in my life at the time whilst helping with my overall fitness levels and getting a bit of tan. It was only when my mate Darren convinced me to climb Ben Nevis and then when Ramesh decided that for his 40th birthday that he wanted to walk the West Highland Way that my take on life completely changed.
I've always enjoyed sport and the outdoors. I played golf for years and it took me around 20 of them to discover that actually the only thing I really enjoy about golf is the walk. This fact is always driven home when I do the usual golf trips with the guys and we end up driving around a beautiful course in a buggy with me popping out every so often to whack a ball that I have no interest in. To me, having a round of golf in a buggy is a bit like taking a dog for a walk around Strathclyde park in a pram - pointless. In saying that, I doubt if I'll ever get a chance to walk around a golf course again at this rate so I should probably be thankful of the buggy opportunities that lie in wait. The fact that I had some level of physical fitness did help when it came to preparing for Ben Nevis and West Highland Way and for months before the dates I had a few practise sessions and a good number of walks on Tinto hill and the John Muir Way. As the walks went on, I got really into the preparation and procedures needed to get a good walk under your belt. From planning the route to watching the weather to preparing back packs and kit, for me it was the ultimate way to extract yourself from the daily grind and lets face it, when you are in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a back pack some sandwiches and a bottle of water, there is not a great deal to desire apart from the pains in your feet to go, the rain to stop or the horseflies to stop biting.
The Ben Nevis climb I remember as being pretty arduous and a lot tougher than I was expecting. We were walking with Martin who had came through a cancer battle some years earlier and on that trip I decided to raise money for cancer research. I can always remember getting to the top of Nevis and thinking 'that's it, I've done the hard bit. It will be easier to get down'. If there is anything I remember from the Nevis climb it's that the climb down was much worse than the climb up. On the way down I could feel every muscle and every bone in my legs and feet and every step down was just pure pain. I had opted for trail shoes rather than boots and the thickness of the soles just highlighted every pebble on the path as it tried to force itself inside me. The elation of finishing however was something that will stay with me forever. What a feeling of accomplishment and wonder that I had managed to push myself to get there and back and sitting in the mini bus driving home I had literally no desire for anything. The West Highland Way was a similar feeling although elevated to a higher lever of achievement over a number of days. We had great weather for the trip and no real dramas along the route but the sense of fulfilment and accomplishment that it brought was something I had never experienced before and is something that I will always cherish for the rest of my life.
Upon completing the WHW march, I promptly set about exploring the rest of the Scottish hills as quickly as I could. I knew my life had changed and I was no longer chasing nights out on the town as I knew this would affect my walking performance. I had lost all appetite for boys toys, fruitless ambitions and superficial things that had driven my desire and suffering to that point. I just yearned to be on a mountainside in Scotland, preferably with moderate weather and a sense that the rest of the world didn't really matter. In the years that passed I managed to bag myself 36 Munros. I won't lie and say they were all like walking in heaven. Many of them made me apprehensive as after the Anoch Eagach I developed a not unusual fear of heights and prior to every mountain assent I would spend hours looking at the relief lines to understand where there were going to be some 'moments'. In the last couple of years walking became that much of an obsession that the usual summer holidays to the sun were now expendable and my preference for travel would be a couple of hours up the A9 to get to something that resembled my form of civilisation.
So as I have gotten older, I have realised that the blessings my Grandmother and others told me about were actually the ones that were on my doorstep and within my inner self. They were a sense of wealth that were so far beyond anything that could be purchased or inherited and have delivered an enormous amount of happiness whilst dealing with the problems of desire and suffering that derived from the corporate monopolies that run the country and control our lives. At this point you would think ok, we get the moral of the story and this chapter would come to a close. The main reason for blogging today however is back to the story I noted a few days back about the attempt by my mates to replicate the Ben Nevis climb and raise some money for MacMillan. As I mentioned before, I have a lot of support and friends who are eager to do something for me to show that they are there for me. As a typical male, anything that is offered is obviously too much and I usually respond with 'yes, I'm ok, I don't need anything'. It may be because of stubbornness or it could be that there is a an element of the unknown and a desire to understand why I generate so much happiness from my walking but a little while back my friends decided that they would climb Ben Nevis for Elvis (me) and this would be the focus of how they would help encourage me back to health. I noted at the time that climbing Nevis in April would be dangerous and that there wasn't a lot of expertise on offer and that it could be that this was a foolhardy mission. I reckoned that something might happen but wasn't really holding my breath for the cash to start rolling in or the preparations to be anything more than a couple of meetings in the boozer and us all taking each other other out of a mad adventure. I was wrong. There has already been a good response to the money raising effort and I'm glad to see that people realise services like MacMillan are very important to everyone. I was also wrong in that in the last few days there has been an incredible attack on Tinto Hill by all my mates. It started on Tuesday when I was in a chemo vegetable state when Darren sent a whatsapp pic of the Tinto top. I was impressed as I had tried to get Darren to climb Tinto last year and we had to turn back due to bad weather and the inherent fact that he was unfit. Then Wednesday he sent me another WhatsApp. He had climbed it again although this time he had dragged David along for the trip which was a sight for sore eyes. I wouldn't say David is unfit but he smokes and drinks a bit and the thought of getting him to the top of Tinto in one piece was not something I had easily considered. He did however complain that he thought that he had left a lung on the mountain. The pictures kept coming, next was a WhatsApp from Mark who had climbed the cobbler, then from the Inglis clan who climbed Tinto, then Scott who climbed Tinto on his own and again from Mark and the Kids who climbed it again and then today from Craig who was the last guy I would have have thought to pull on a pair of boots and walk the hill.
At the start of the week I felt terrible, the chemo really kicked me in the head. As the days have rolled on I have mostly been a bit of a vegetable lying on the coach watching the TV world go by. The stories since Tuesday of the guys climbing all over the place however has every day given me a little bit more strength and encouragement and although I am extremely jealous not to be out there myself bagging hills, I am so proud and happy that the guys that I've grown up with and have spent so much time with over the years have decided to help me in this way. In all honesty, this is the biggest moral booster that anyone could be given and I am so grateful to my mates for 1) Getting involved and seeing the real Scotland 2) Working for a charity that is so worthwhile.
Yesterday I phoned my GP as I was running out of morphine. I asked Dr Kumar to refer me to MacMillan in order to assess my pain management situation and today I was visited by a MacMillan nurse. It was a good session and all my questions were answered, my details captured and my drugs altered in order to give a better management of the current problem. I didn't really understand the role of MacMillan when I started this exercise but it is now becoming clear how they are a vital link into the overall mental and physical health of patients in a similar situation to myself. Without the services of MacMillan it would be easy to see how people would suffer over long periods of time and in this world there is no need to be in that situation.
It gives me a lot of pride and pleasure to think about the fund raising efforts that my friends have set out for themselves and for others that use the services of MacMillan there is an opportunity to support them by using the just giving funding resource below.
https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/david-gardner?utm_id=108&utm_term=Pg5aA9Zzy
