Walking with Plato by Gary Hayden Read Free Book Online Page A

and allow my thoughts to wander freely. And slowly, surely, and simply, the knots began to unravel. I began to understand who I was and what kind of person I wanted – needed – to become.
    Mostly, it was the solitude that helped me to gain clarity. During twenty-odd years in the fundamentalist church, I had acquired a whole host of significant others – pastors, elders, teachers, preachers, house-group leaders, worship leaders, congregation members, friends, and relatives – who all had very strong opinions about who I was and what kind of person I ought to become. With all of their noise and clamour and expectation, I found it impossible to think, or even to feel, for myself. But away from them all, alone in the forests and beside the lakes, I began to discern the beating of my own heart.
    Solitude, by itself, though, wouldn’t have been enough. It wouldn’t have brought me the stillness and clarity that I needed. The walking was important too.
    There is something about walking – the steady, unhurried rhythm, the gentle stimulation of heart and lungs, and the pleasant synchronization of mind and body – that soothes the spirit and frees the mind.
    This is especially true of walking in the countryside, where the quiet beauty of the surroundings soothes the spirit still further, and where the wide-open spaces offer still greater freedom to the mind.

    It was during the second week of that camping trip that I discovered Plato.
    One of the things that the solitude and the walking helped me to realize was that I needed to widen my intellectual horizons. I needed to expose myself to some new ideas, and start thinking things through for myself.
    So, when I saw a battered old copy of Plato’s Republic in a second-hand bookshop, I bought it.
    I knew nothing about Plato, except that he was an Ancient Greek, and that he was a philosopher. But ‘philosopher’ meant thinker  – and that’s what I wanted to be.
    So I started at page one, and I read the Republic .
    It wasn’t what I expected (though I’m not sure what I did expect). It turned out to be a dialogue – a play, of sorts – in which the character Socrates discusses the concept of justice with a bunch of other characters.
    It was hard work, and I didn’t understand it all. But it excited me anyway, because it exposed me to a whole new way of trying to understand the world.
    Socrates and his companions didn’t just tell each other what to think. They reasoned with one another. They talked , and they listened , and they thought things through .
    It was the complete opposite of everything I had ever known. And it was brilliant.
    For the rest of the week, I carried that battered old copy of the Republic with me, and I walked with Plato.
    Plato introduced me to philosophy; and philosophy introduced me to Epicurus, Bertrand Russell, William James, Gensei, Hegel, and all of the other great thinkers that have kept me company ever since.

    Walking over Rannoch Moor was a joy, but I had little time to savour it. Not so much because the ten-mile crossing of the moor made up only half of the day’s journey, leaving plenty of ground still to cover, but rather because the Rannoch midges descended upon us in a feeding frenzy whenever we tried to stop or slow our pace.
    Having crossed the moor, we walked for nine miles along the floor of the glen to the Pine Trees Leisure Park in the tourist village of Tyndrum. There, for reasons I can’t recall, we splashed out on a ‘hiker hut’ (a wooden shed, complete with twin beds, electrical sockets, and a kettle) rather than pitching our tent.

    The next stage of the West Highland Way, a thirteen-mile jaunt through farmland, forests, and riverside paths, from Tyndrum to Inverarnan , passed quickly and pleasantly.
    As I walked along, not at all focusing on, but nonetheless enjoying, the varied scenery, I found myself musing on what it is about the countryside that is so soothing to the spirit and so refreshing to the