THE HILL WE CLIMB...

 

Like so many millions, I watched the Inauguration of US President Biden a few weeks ago; like so many millions, I was impressed and almost enthralled by the performance of the US Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman.

 

Her poem, The Hill We Climb, resonated throughout the world that day.  That young, slight figure in a joyfully bright, yellow coat transfixed almost everyone who watched and listened to her.

 

Her words are echoing in my mind this evening.

 

It’s incredibly cold in my part of Northern Ireland, and far beyond.  Desperate for a screen break while working mainly from home, I’ve been going for my daily walk most days, despite the wintry cold.  This evening, I battled through an icy wind and intermittent snow flurries as I walked my ‘almost 5km’ by the sea. 

 

My walk, which I’ve recently discovered is mapped on the health app of my phone, takes me along the edges of two different beaches, up a steep path on one side of the local headland and then, at the top, along its length.  It takes me around a small harbour and along a pier, along promenades to the west and to the east.  The climate changes according to wind direction:  most days, the western side of the peninsula-structured town is milder and less windswept.  Today, with a strong, icy easterly force 4, the headland part was an endurance test; returning to the eastern side of the peninsula to finish the walk, snow flurries were settling on my eyelashes and making my eyes stream.  A challenge.

 

And yet.

 

Just as I reached the most exposed part of the headland, where I always admire my favourite of the walk’s many picturesque views, the sun was setting.  The sky aflame to the west, the heavy, looming grey clouds parting to show icy blue and snowcloud white.  It was worth how cold I felt as I stood, alone, at the edge of the cliff path, trying to stop my hand shaking as I took a photo on my phone. Returning to the east to finish my walk, I noticed the snow starting to gather on the sand at the edge of the beach, beneath the walkway.  Like icing sugar sieved onto a cake.  By that time, I was too cold to take a photo.  I couldn’t have held my phone steady any more and I don’t think the delicate effect would have been visible on screen.  I decided that I’d just remember it instead.

 

The hill we climb: the metaphor is obvious, and the metaphor was the hook upon which Amanda Gorman based her poem. 

 

A walk in the depths of the February cold is a challenge.  I’m still freezing, and it’s two hours since I returned to a comfortably cosy home.  I’ve asked myself a few questions, mid-ordeal, these last few days.  Yesterday:  why is there always ‘that guy’, who insists on wearing shorts (and a coat, and usually hiking boots), striding along pretending he’s not cold, as his knees and legs turn purple?  Today:  why am I putting myself through this, with only the hardiest dog-walkers for company, on a day when a severe weather warning for extreme wind chill has been issued?

 

Sometimes it’s our ordeals which give us clarity.  After yet another day spent working on screens, I desperately needed to get out.  To fix my eyes on the middle and far distance and just think.  To figure out what all I’m doing means, and how I can get through everything without losing my perspective.  Sometimes even those favourite varifocals aren’t enough for 20/20 vision. 

 

I saw the most stunning view from that painfully cold moment on my walk; sometimes the difficult things we go through give us a strikingly clear picture of what matters.  Something difficult we've endured, which has chilled us right to the bones or made our eyes stream until we can’t tell any more what’s tears and what’s exposure:  that will tell us something about what matters.  That will give us clarity about the friends we can really count on.  The people who really care, and don’t just say they do.  The things that really make us happy and how we can preserve them in our lives.

 

And when we’ve seen those things, we know the hill we climbed, that freezing February late afternoon, just as the sun was setting, was worth the trouble.  Worth the elevated heartbeat, recorded on a watch or phone.  Worth shaking with cold.  Worth all worry about a dropped phone, trying to take that photograph, because of hands, reduced to claws from endless typing, which were now completely numb.

 

The hill we climb is universal. It might be the political landscape, immortalised in Amanda Gorman’s wonderful poem.  It might be the dangers and the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.  It might be our health.  It might be family life, locked down and then gone wrong.  It might be too much work or having no work at all; isolation, loneliness or the claustrophobic cage of permanently invaded privacy.  It could be all of these, and so much more.  At any time.  For all of us.

 

Today, for me, it was a steep cliff path along one side of a headland, in cold that was almost too much to take in.  But the view...  Sometimes the sheer beauty of a winter sky can make an icy climb worthwhile.

 

And sometimes it’s the hills we climb which make us truly value those moments when we feel the ground level out beneath our feet.  And then we look into the middle and further distance.  And we take a breath.

 

And somehow, at that moment, what we see makes sense.