There is a certain philosophical patience, a slightly stubborn stoicism, required to be an injured climber in Fontainebleau. Or perhaps it's all just me.
I returned to the Forest last Thursday, five days now. Better prepared, better equipped this time, staying at a better campsite. I've got a stove that works, cutlery and things to eat.
The campsite is in Samoreau, a small village a few kilometres from Fontainebleau itself. The forest isn't so thick here and I'm not woken by the sound of birdsong in the morning. Bluebells don't carpet the woods, but the Seine does flow quietly by and you can swim in the heat of the afternoon or doze in the sunshine.
I hired a bike, fifty Euros a small price for a week of freedom, but, unable to really climb, I've begun to question why I'm here. I could change my plans, I could give up on the idea of climbing completely. I said I'd be in Romania at the beginning of June, but I've no real commitments, just to be back before September. I can feel the existential angst of complete freedom, that dizzying vertigo of having noone but myself to decide my fate.
I've laid out my plans though, and I'm loath to change them. It's not just the money of a prebooked fare to Munich, not just the tantalising possiblity my hand will recover in a day or two, it's more: stubbornness perhaps (it's been noted that I'm not the only member of my family to be blessed with this trait).
I read somewhere that Men and Women should employ different strategies for achieving their goals. One should break up big plans into little, achievable targets and the other should make their goals public - tell their friends - making them more concrete. I can't remember which strategy applied to which gender (they both sound like sensible advice for everyone), but having made my trip so public, broadcast it so wide, it feels like failing if I do something other than carry out my original plans.
Which is doubly crazy. My plans must change because I'm unable to get a Russian visa: you have to be in the country of your citizenship and apply to the embassy in that country to get one. Which makes it somewhat unfeasible for me to get one now (it's not impossible as I could go home for two weeks and start again, but I don't particularly want to do that). Apparently this is a relatively recent change to the rules, I hadn't seen it before. Who knows. Perhaps I'll fly to Mongolia and just skip Russia, I haven't decided. The alternative, the Silk route, suffers from the same problem: perverse visa requirements for many of the countries involved, most of which are former states of the USSR. I could buy a Champions league ticket I suppose.
And whose trip is this anyway? Who would really say it was a failure to spend four months seeing Europe or just climbing or even just going homme early?
I would.
I see four months in Europe as too easy, a cop-out, a failure to achieve. Someone once criticised me for viewing life as one long checklist of experiences to have, that a full life is one in which things have been ticked off. And to a certain extent they were right. I've got better, but I remain someone who wants to take a Greyhound from New York to Los Angeles, knowing it would be hell, just to know I'd done it, I'd experienced it, for the sheer sake of it. Europe just doesn't seem like enough of an experience-to-tick-off to be a replacement for my previous plans.
So why am I still here, in Fontainebleau, when I could be getting on with the journey, the experience? Perhaps one would expect me to feel the same - that it's a failure to be killing time, just walking and cycling and reading and sunbathing - about two weeks in Fontainebleau, injured and unable, at the moment, to climb. But I don't.
I came here to push my grade, to climb Font 7b, maybe 7b+. Not 'hard' climbing, but getting there, knocking on the door. The number was the thing. I was coming for my ego. But that isn't going to happen now. Why don't I just leave? I'm beginning to think it isn't just stubbornness.
There's things to be learnt in the hedgerows, in the dappled lanes and quiet stillness of the trees. The forest is beautiful. Enchanting, even, and magical. Sunlight peppers the lanes and turns leaves bright green translucent against the blue sky whilst their shadows dance in the breeze - Glory be to God for dappled things! - and birdsong fills the silence of the forest. Nothing is so beautiful as spring.
But camping alone is lonely, particularly now my Dutch friends, with their football and their frisbee and their cheery hullos, have left and now that Brice and Giorgio - here for the weekend, one night only - have gone. And it's a little boring, all this sun and cycling.
This, perhaps, is the crux. It shouldn't be, neither lonely nor boring. Or, rather, I think it shouldn't be. And this is why I'm staying, perverse and stubborn as it may be.
I want to be comfortable with myself. To just sit. To not need to read, or to be busy or going somewhere, but truly to just sit. I don't know why. Sometimes, when I'm climbing, bouldering at the Crags in Edinburgh usually, I feel the crowded thoughts drop away. One by one they disappear. I'm not conscious they're leaving until there is just one left. Like meditating, the clamour dies down to one solitary thought, that circles and repeats itself. And sometimes, when I'm lucky, that too dies away. There's nothing, just that moment, that movement. There's that feeling of the rock just so under my fingers, the pressure of my boot just there. Everything is clear and crisp and calm; there is nothing but that moment, and that movement.
Perhaps that is what I'm looking for. Here, and now, but without the climbing. I know those moments are lost in the busyness of cities and the chaos of couchsurfing. I don't want to meditate for two weeks, but maybe I can find it just cycling, just wlking or just sitting.
Life is busy, my mind busier still. It's been up and down in the last year, longer even, an emotional rollercoaster with its accompanying self-analysis and introspection. Perhaps I think that with enough time, enough stillness, enough just being, those thoughts - those yesterdays - will drop away. It's not a matter of forgetting, but of accepting, of letting the thoughts fall away until there is calm.
Perhaps that is what the hedgerows have to teach me.
