Overcoming a Roadblock

Firstly I would like to say thank you for all your kind comments last week. My love language is words of affirmation so your comments on last week’s post, on our anniversary on Wednesday, and for my birthday on Friday mean so much to me. Thank you for filling my love tank.

We didn’t do much to celebrate our wedding anniversary on the actual day. We went out to lunch together, and for supper we shared celebration cakes and churros with our good friends who were also celebrating a recent anniversary.

On Thursday we celebrated by going for a bush walk. We walked to Crescent Bay. It’s not a long walk by any stretch of the imagination but it was a big walk in my mind.

The last time I had attempted this bush walk was about 20 years ago. We had arranged to go for a walk with friends. I was six months pregnant at the time and I had spent my pregnancy so far lying on the couch and eating. I was not fit. I was not energetic. But I had been told that it was an easy walk, fairly flat, and so I was willing to try.

It takes a bit of time to drive to the start of this walk. Google says 1 hour 41 minutes. On Thursday we took our time, I wrote a short story to start off with which made us leave home fairly late in the morning, then we stopped for coffee and chai, stopped to say hello to Caleb at the campsite where he was working (and to pick up Moz’s sunnies), and eventually stopped for lunch at Remarkable Cave where the track begins.

I remember that 20 years ago, by the time we had got to Remarkable Cave I already had a headache and wanted to go home. But I pulled myself out of the car and started walking. There I was, hoping for a walk that would be like a wander along the street. Flat and easy. What I got was something very different.

There are just a few places on this walk where the track is very steep, steep up and steep down. Most of the track, in fairness, is reasonably flat. But there are just a few points where flat is not a description you can use at all. The walk did not meet my expectations and I wasn’t sure I could make it.

So that’s how I ended up in tears in the middle of a bush walk. And that’s how this particular walk loomed large in my memory.

And you know, I wouldn’t say that I’m fit right now either. I wasn’t sure how my body was going to cope. But I was determined to try.

If you’re the type of Tasmanian that goes for walks all the time, or a person that jogs for fun, or even someone who is reasonably fit you are probably laughing at me right now. It took us all of an hour to walk in to Crescent Bay and it took us an hour to walk out. We had a lovely hour at the beach wandering along through the waves. (We did not slide down the sand dunes on a boogie board. I wasn’t going to waste energy climbing up.)

It was not a hard walk.

But in my head it was quite a large thing to overcome. It had sat in my mind for 20 years. That bush walk that had reduced me to tears. That was the walk that others say is easy but I that had found so desperately hard.

I had to go back there and try it again. I needed to know I could. And, yes, I could make it. It wasn’t that hard at all.

It is now a goal of mine for this year to get fit enough to go on the walk again in a year’s time and find it easy. To race along the path like it’s no problem at all. Maybe even to have the energy to go dune sliding once we get there. I know I have been fit enough for this in the past, and I intend to be fit enough in the future.

I wonder if there is something in your mind that is a roadblock like the Crescent Bay walk was for me? It may not be a physical thing. You may have tried to write a story in the past and got stuck and now have trouble picking up a pen. You might want to play an instrument but you remember how embarrassed you felt in music class in high school when you took hold of the clarinet for the first time and made that first really awful squeak. You might want to go to uni but you remember just how hard maths was in grade ten.

There are so many places where we can get stuck. But sometimes it’s just that the timing wasn’t right that first time. Things change. We change. Maybe if you have another run at it, you will find that it isn’t quite so hard now as it used to be. You probably have new tools at your disposal, new skills you’ve learned along the road of life. And that roadblock might now only be the size of a speed hump.

Can I encourage you this year to give it a go? Have another try. See what you can learn from the experience. You might just end up having an experience as lovely as my walk along to Crescent Bay on Thursday. I hope and pray that you do.

We didn’t take enough pictures for you to really appreciate the dunes so I have found a website you can look at that shows you the beauty of the spot much better than my pictures do.

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