Friday 16th May - My Oxygenated Life - A long walk

The walk

We had arranged to meet someone at Nymans Gardens this morning. Perfect weather for the meeting, sitting outside in the café area before it got too busy. Afterwards we wandered around...

I do love a hidden window

Taking time to admire the view; I realised it had been such a long time since I last stopped and looked out upon a distant scene. I've spent so long indoors or in our garden over the past couple of months.

Ah, but then... we were at the bottom of the garden, and the way out was at the top! We carry two oxygen cylinders when we go out. One lasts me just about and hour at a flow rate of 7 l/m. I can feel the oxygen whooshing up my nose as a strong cold draught, which is one of the reasons I'm not keen on walking any distance in cold weather! But to get up the hill, I need a flow rate of 9 l/m, and plenty of stops along the way!

Muttering 'I think I can, I think I can' 

I made it all the way up to the top! Ta-dah!

If you zoom into the picture you will just be able to make out a group of people, only their heads showing, on the lower path.

We passed two women and a man having their way down the path. The man (no lightweight, I should add!) was in the wheelchair, and the women were desperately hanging onto the handles to prevent the wheelchair careering down to the bottom. The moral of the story is choose a wheelchair with brake on the handles, not just the wheels... they were more or less past the steepest bit of the path, and the rest of the garden would be much easier for them.

This was my first long walk this year, and I was delighted to find that I had reached my daily target of 2000+ steps in the two hours we were at Nymans. Normally I call it an 'activity counter' rather than a step counter, as chopping vegetables, winding wool and playing the piano can all add several hundred steps without me moving my feet!

Poor BB struggles to stay with me; I go so slowly that I'm nearly in danger of falling over; it's twice as hard for him with his long legs. 

Peace

I was thinking about this morning, how beautiful it was there, while watching the news with pictures of somewhere in Gaza. Everything had been destroyed in the latest attack; the reporter commentedthat it was difficult to even see which part of the city had been hit. Like pictures of parts of the Ukraine, Lebanon, Syria, and going back through the decades to Southampton, Coventry, Dresden, the battlefields in Belgium and France in the First World War. 'We pray, but our prayers don't seem to be answered' was a comment yesterday. 

I'm still working out what I think... I don't want to twist my beliefs into a pretzel to make them fit a simple answer, but I suspect that the 'answer' is both simple and complex at the same time. In fact I don't think my thoughts constitute 'an answer' so much as a response to a centuries old c9nundrum.

I'm grateful for the comment to make me think...

Music

Still thinking about peace, if music can be a prayer, then this is my prayer.

 (It's 'le Jardin Faerique' from the Mother Goose suite by Ravel. Please don't imagine I would like to suggest that God is some magical, fantastical creation. It's the music, not the title, that carries my prayer. Indeed, I have no idea of how I would begin to cope with this illness, and everything else, without faith in God to carry me through. )