The many tastes of love, forgiveness and the pursuit of joy

I tried hiking solo for the first time. Terrified my mother. Before my thirties, I didn’t do any hiking, let alone go into the bush on my own. She probably wished I just took up drinking and stayed home, just kidding, I'm allergic to alcohol. Turns out ugly breathing your way up a mountain is surprisingly cathartic. It taught me to trust myself, and what I lacked in fitness, I made up with resilience.

I still love hiking solo and do it often, and over the years I’ve started hiking with other people too. People always tell me how brave I am to hike alone, and I usually reply, ‘I am, but you can be too. You just haven’t given yourself permission to be brave yet.” Like my workmate Kim. We don’t hang out outside of work, but she keeps up with my hiking blogs and photos on social media. Last year, we were having lunch in the staffroom and she told me that hiking to a DoC hut was on her “someday” list. I asked her, “Do you want to turn ‘someday’ into ‘let’s make a plan’?” It took her a week, but she said yes.

We had two months before our hike to the Upper Whirinaki Hut. Kim had A LOT of questions, I felt like I was her personal Google at one stage. For me, getting Kim to the start of the track was already a win, not being helicoptered out was a bonus. We were a group of six and Kim and I walked at a slower pace than the others. An hour from the hut, the track became narrow and slippery. I turned away for a second when suddenly I heard a big splash. Kim had slipped, flown over the bank and into the river. She was wet and a bit shaken, but uninjured.

What is enough, and how will you know when you have it?

Like Alice, I went down a hole recently. YouTube recommendations took me down the Stoicism rabbit hole - quite the change from my usual tarot readings, 80s ballads and the Ink Master tattoo series. What the heck, I don’t even have a tattoo! One morning I clicked on a YouTube short from the ‘Daily Stoic’, which gives you bite-sized learnings from the classics of Stoic philosophy. YouTube shorts are like short reels on Instagram - they’re quick, snappy videos that are designed to keep you scrolling for more.

‘How To Find Enough With Stoicism’ talks about a conversation between Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller (author of Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five). They were at a party hosted by a billionaire, where Vonnegut teases Heller that the billionaire made more money in a week than both his books would make in his lifetime.

“But I have something that he doesn’t have,” Heller says. “I have some idea of what enough is. I have enough.”

I replayed it over and over that morning. If it was on a cassette tape, the stereo would have surely eaten it by then. “If you don’t have an idea of what is enough, the goal posts will always shift.” Those words looped around in my head all day. At night. Then again the next day.

What is enough, and how will I know when I have it? Honestly, I didn’t have an answer for that until I met up with my friend Travis recently.

Own your awesome and work to your strengths

I don’t remember my first day of school, but I still have memories of being in Ms Nagit’s class. She must have been in her early thirties (adults all look older when you’re a kid, right?), usually dressed in a corporate two piece with heels that would echo as she paced the classroom. Ms Nagit was my last teacher in the Philippines before we moved to New Zealand and it wasn’t until I started teaching dance and TEFL that I realised how much of a profound influence being in her class had on my internal tapes.

My sister and I went to Dominican School, a private Catholic school in Manila. A quick Google tells me the uniform hasn’t changed much since we went there in the eighties - it always reminded me of something out of the Sailor Moon cartoon I used to watch as a kid. Even though I did enjoy going to school, based on the Philippine education standard I was at best, pretty average. On the other hand, my older sister Khristina was almost always at the top of her class.

Choose to be the energy in the room, don't adapt to it

I’ve spent the last five years in introspection, digging right down to the bedrock to make sense of the woman I was becoming. Yet lately I’ve been asked to embrace a much different energy. Last year, apart from living through a pandemic, I also had emergency surgery. I had been in severe pain for three days until my mum finally convinced me to go to see my doctor on the fourth. I didn’t go home after that, just straight to A&E. It took me out for two months - no dancing, no climbing, no hiking.

Funny things happen when you’re forced to be still. It planted a seed of thought that's just now manifesting in my world (mostly because I'm a procrastinator when it comes to these things).

I’ve been part of the waiata (singing) group at work for almost as long as I’ve worked there. Singing is something I enjoy and it’s a great way to get to know your workmates. I can sing in tune most of the time but I’ve always been more comfortable as part of the ensemble, not as a soloist. I would turn up to waiata on a Friday, and all around me I could many around me holding back. So I held back too. We mirrored each other, and for a while I felt our growth as a group stagnate.

Let go. Receive. Be open to love. Give more hugs.

Have you ever had a recurring dream that you remember so vividly that you wonder if you had actually lived that moment in a parallel universe? Quite the question, I know. I’ve had two dreams like that, and they always pop up whenever I’m changing trajectory or procrastinating about some life decisions. The flying one is my favourite.

I’ve always been fascinated by dreams, but apart from the odd Google search, I’ve never done much about it. Last week as I was scrolling through a friend’s Instagram, I read a comment that was talking about a dream interpretation workshop. It was meant to be in-person that weekend, but because of the lockdown, had moved it to Zoom.

Here’s the thing, I’m not a fan of Zoom. Dislike, yes. Hate? I wouldn’t go that far. I easily get distracted with whatever my face is doing, conversations never flow, and somehow the silence is more awkward as you all stare intensely at the screen.

The wound is the place where the light enters you

Do you remember the scene in Forrest Gump where he had been running for over three years, hair and beard had grown long and wild, and all of sudden he just stopped in the middle of the road. “I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go home now.” Priceless.

And that was it, he turns around and starts running back home.

He reflects, then utters the words that summed up why tramping has become such a big part of my life. “You’ve got to put the past behind you before you can move on, and I think that’s what my running was all about.” I stumbled into tramping much like I stumbled into graphic design - I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but my gut was telling me to look for something better than what my logical mind was showing me at the time.

© 2015 Five Foot Ronna

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