A new plan, again: Days 15 and 16

The numbering of these things has got confused. Initially I was using the mornings to write up my notes from the previous day, so I'd be posting Day 6 around lunchtime on Day 7, then making notes for Day 7 and writing those up on Day 8. But then I had stuff fresh on my mind and I needed to get it out of me there and then, and that nudged me forward into posting about the day's events on the day they happened. The result is that writing this now, on Monday, it is actually the 16th day. Which is good.

Tough morning this morning though. Woke up feeling like a freight train had been roaring through my mind all night. Head was pounding, every neuron felt like it was pulling away from every other. Very groggy, musty, low.

For a while I lay there thinking how I couldn't do this, how I should be past this stuff, but here I was feeling worse than ever.

But I think it's important, vitally important, to remember that healing is not linear. The path to wholeness is not one smooth upward line.

It is jagged, uneven, unpredictable. It is a mountainous climb with the ground ever shifting beneath your feet. Some days you make good progress. Other days you're stuck in a quagmire. Occasionally you fall into a crevasse in which the bottom feels lower than even the lowest point from which you began your progress.

But it's possible, nay, necessary, to accept that for what it is. No journey of worth ever went in a straight line. And all the time you spend wishing things were easier is time you could have spent moving forwards. Even if forwards is sometimes backwards, or sideways, or down.

And if you find yourself in that crevasse try to remember all the equipment you've picked up along your way, all the endurance you've built. How much better you've become at reading the terrain. That this is the journey you signed up for and you know how to do this and that, yes, this section is tough, and it may not feel like it now, but you are gradually, painstakingly, yet nevertheless indisputably on the way up.

So finish that thermos of coffee, shake out the dregs, roll up your camp bed and hoist your pack, and go face that cold sheer wall of rock that is no different in truth to all the other walls of rock you have faced before, and once again begin your climb. There is nothing else.