This post is about the one ability and one of the places that I miss the most. It’s also about how although the missing is sometimes very painful, I’m still okay, and how often contradictory things can be true at the same time.
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After almost 6 years, maybe I should be used to this new life of chronic illness and dramatically reduced physical capacity, but sometimes I still feel renewed shock and fresh grief about parts of life that have been cut off from me. I think these episodes will probably never completely fade.
I really miss the places that my healthy body (albeit along with the help of some fossil fuels) could take me. Specifically, I miss places such as Cradle Mountain, which I used to think of as my second home, as I had worked there on and off since 2003. I miss my familiarity with its ecology. It’s burrow-dwelling wombats and beady-eyed, big beaked currawongs. It’s diverse flowering heath, meadows of coppery coral fern, and golden, bobble-headed buttongrass plains. It’s deep, tannin-stained lakes, glacially sculpted peaks and astonishingly red waratahs. It’s dark green King-Billy pine forests and crepuscular platypus. The smells, sounds and the feeling of being there. The sweetness of unpolluted wilderness air, the butterscotch taste of scoparia flowers, and the constantly refreshing wind, sun, clouds, rain and snow. The feeling of wild aliveness, when literally living high on mountain trails amongst boundless space, far away from roads and cities.
Places between Cradle mountain and Lake St. Clair (leeawulenna), along the 80km Overland track, that I trudged for five seasons as a ranger and many other times as a guide or just on my own recreational trips, come to me in my dreams a lot. Often just before sleep, a particular segment of the trail flashes up, in poignant, fleeting detail.
The old, soft, wooden boards in the mud, just after the bridge on the trail into Pine Valley, where you leave the pink mountain berry scrub behind as the forest type deepens and darkens, and it’s like you are entering a different world.
Descending from the rocky lookout, through the grove of tangled fagus to the valley of Lake Windemere, and passing the old, squat, twisted, sentinel of a snowgum.
The crunch of quartzite under boots, the sound of a shallow stream and the rustling of pandani foliage when traversing the rim of the Waterfall Valley cirque.
The roaring of the waterfalls, the flitting of swallowtail butterflies through the sassafras, and the dappled sunlight where the deep pools of the Mersey river are shaded by myrtle beech and arching Diselma pines.
The wattlebirds guffawing at Pelion Plains and the bluish tussocks of poa grass, heavy with raindrops, brushing wetly against my pant legs.
The fermented smell of the cider gum sap and herby wallaby poo on the marsupial lawns, where the Narcissus river spills out into the long, deep, mountain-rimmed lake of leeawuleena.
Places I will likely never see again.
And I miss the feeling of a fit and healthy body.
How strong and sure footed I was. A miraculous self-regulating system, all contained within my frame. My mitochondria generating boundless supplies of energy, my breath puffing and panting, heart beating, skin sweating, muscles stretching and contracting, endorphins flowing, hands and arms adjusting the straps of my pack, the rhythmic play of balance with feet, legs, pelvis and eyes, taking me forwards, steady and human-paced, across the winding and rocky landscape.
I miss the act of walking, even along the cement pathways of suburbs and cities. Walking was my daily friend, my joy, and it was my coping mechanism for life’s difficulties. Maybe it’s a little like losing a partner, who was many things to you, including your everyday companion, someone with whom you sometimes shared wonderful adventures and who was also a support in challenging times. After losing them, you enter uncharted hard times, compounded by the stark absence of your primary coping mechanism.
Big, big, fat sigh.
But, as I always say, I’m okay. Shit happens, and we keep going. And I’m always ready to defend the multiplicities and complex shades of grey within me, and within all of human experience.
I can be struck by excruciating, unfulfillable longing for what I’ve lost, and at the same time, feel gratitude for what I still have. Gratitude, even, for what I’ve gained in compassion, calm and acceptance.
I can sorely miss the highs of joy from mountain climbing, lake swimming and physical touch. But also know that I am better at being content now, with a stiller, quieter life, and at noticing small, everyday pleasures like the grass beneath my feet and the breeze upon my skin.
I can know that many people have health problems far worse than mine, and/or have much less support, yet still be distraught at my own misfortune, and regularly astonished and frustrated at the size of the gap between my previous capacity, and the tiny energy window I have available now.
I can be devastated that I lost my health when aged only 33, yet amazed how lucky I was that I got to be so well for that long.
I can hate my house for being a prison that I’m stuck in, and also love it for being a place of refuge from the exhausting stimuli of the outside world.
I can yearn desperately to get better, and also employ some grace in the acceptance of here and now.
I can be grief stricken and terrified by the fact I will probably have this disease for the rest of my life, concurrently hugely daunted by the slim prospect of re-entering society if I were to undergo an unlikely recovery, and mostly confident I would be able to handle either scenario, if taken one day at a time, even when some of those days are shitful.
I can feel surly and jealous of people who can still enjoy a physically robust relationship with life, yet entirely happy for them at the same time, and would never wish away their fortune. It’s true that when I come in close quarters with someone who has what I miss, the highlighted contrast can play havoc with my equanimity, whether they are reveling in it or taking it for granted. But I can’t be truly jealous of younger people, as I was disgustingly healthy when I was their age too, living life to the fullest and only vaguely, theoretically aware of my able-bodied privilege. And nor can I be truly jealous of older people, because not many humans get to age without being wrested through the wrangles of their own particular losses and grief.
I was thinking of composing a post about these multiplicities within human experience for a while, then feminist author Clementine Ford did so, when her home town of Melbourne was going back into lockdown this year. Although the reason for, and the apex of her missing was on different things, she said it so eloquently, that it seems superfluous to try and say the same thing myself in different words. (N.b. If anyone thinks this author is too controversial, then maybe you should actually read her books, not the lies spread about her).
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