True North | Pinnacle Newsletter #60
#60 True North
Something that’s always stuck in my mind is an email one of my blog’s readers sent me about ten years ago:
‘I’ve always admired the way you seem to know exactly what you want, and arrange your life so that you get it.’
At the time that remark baffled me. I barely knew what I wanted on any conscious level, and I didn’t think my life choices were particularly notable (at the time I was working as a barman in Glen Coe). But that remark has stuck in my mind ever since, and has helped me to figure something out.
For about eighteen years now, more than half my life, I have been making decisions that allow me to do three things with my time:
Write
Spend time in the mountains
Walk long distances
I’ve only been consciously aware of these all-consuming priorities for about eight or nine years. Of course, I knew that I liked to do these things before then, but I was not deliberately arranging my life in this way. Or was I? In 2008 I turned away from a career in software development to go and live in the mountains and write a novel (while pulling pints and washing dishes in my spare time). It’s easy to look back now and create a neat narrative for this life change, of course, and the truth is that many factors led to me getting off a bus in Glencoe village in the pouring rain with everything I owned in three bags. Such radical steps are easy for the very young. As I’ve grown older (and I’m pretty young still!) the choices have become harder and more constrained, but always I have aimed for that north star: write, hike, explore nature. While I need many other things for a fulfilling life, these are the priorities I’ve stuck with for the longest.
I don’t always succeed. I spend a good chunk of my week hiking, but writing time – real writing time – is precious and must be coaxed like a delicate flame. It’s all so much more complicated than it seemed to me at sixteen (or even twenty-six). I may be a professional writer and editor – hey, sixteen-year-old Alex, you achieved your dream after all! – but somehow I seem to spend most of my time faffing about with emails and doing stuff that feels a bit pointless, stuff which somehow still adds minutes to the timesheet (subtracting minutes from theoretical writing time, because this is a zero-sum game). For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived with the constant, gnawing guilt whenever I am not actually writing, as if I’m failing my one truest imperative by doing anything else. It’s a feeling as familiar to me as the cotton wool that fills my skull after too long on the internet.
Life’s a funny old thing, isn’t it? Sometimes I wonder if these ironclad priorities chose me, planted in my psyche by some combination of events in my childhood, or perhaps stamped into my DNA before birth (my dad, after all, walked constantly and wrote countless millions of words). But whether I chose these goals or they chose me, they are mine, and will be for life. When faced with any decision, I almost always choose the course of action that will let me write and hike more, spend more time in the mountains, even if it comes at a financial or personal cost. And when I find myself straying from the bearing I have set – as I have found myself straying a few times – there will inevitably be a course correction in my near future. To combine these priorities in a career is a privilege, even though it isn’t simple or easy.
In other news…
Work on the August issue of The Great Outdoors magazine is now well underway. I’m finding it rewarding and challenging in equal measure.
Delighted to announce that I have finished work on Sky Dance by John D. Burns, and delivered the final manuscript to Jon Barton at Vertebrate Publishing. It’ll be published this September. I can’t wait to see this very special book in print.
The e-book edition of Feet and Wheels to Chimborazo by Mark Horrell, which I edited, is now available to pre-order.
Recently published
What I’ve been reading this week – this week’s quality online reads on the outdoors, backpacking and environment.
Observations from the edge of the wood – this is why I no longer carry headphones on my morning walks.
Making time for fitness, part two – 20kg lost in two years – no magic bullet here, just small changes applied consistently over a long period.
Until next time,
Alex
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