Haere Ra, Aotearoa

Posted by Ed on March 5, 2020

I’m writing this from Sydney, where I’ve spent the last couple of days since leaving New Zealand before heading home via Vietnam for a few weeks. It’s been almost a year and a half since I left the UK, and so this is something like the end of an era.

I feel like I’ve grown and matured a great deal as a result of my experiences over the past 18 months. I’ve made invaluable strides towards achieving bigger and better goals in both my running and my career, and I’ve made friendships that will last for many years to come.

And yet, and yet.

Bloggers, and writers in general, have a tendency to constantly package and categorise things; to compress an experience down into its essential form, tie a nice little ribbon around it, and send it out into the world.

In a way, I guess this process is more or less what writing is. And there’s nothing wrong with it, per se – the world is a complex place, and writing helps you straighten things out. It can be immensely therapeutic – but nobody in their right mind would argue that therapy should be a public affair.

Now that I have finally reached the end of my time in New Zealand, there’s an enormous temptation to ‘wrap things up’ with a long, lyrical blog post summarising my experience. It would feature some carefully crafted observations about life, the universe, and everything, and the whole post would tie in with some specific experience I had whilst in New Zealand – maybe a mountain summit or a race report.

I’m not going to do that, tempting as it might be. The plain and simple reason is that it would be too much of an artifice for me to bear publishing. Of course I learnt things in the last 18 months, about myself and the world – I would be worried if I hadn’t.

There’s a sentiment that Rickey Gates expressed on a Ginger Runner Live podcast a while back. He was describing his 2017 run across the United States, and the process of subsequently writing about the trip, and said this:

“It’s just five months of my life, and now I’m living in a different five months. And the next five months are going to be different, and honestly these next five months should be no less important than those five months that I was traversing the country.”

Ive found this Zen-like observation to be of great utility to me. It’s a variation of “This too shall pass”, itself an injunction to reflect, in bad times and good, that the present is transient.

My time in New Zealand was one of significant personal growth, perhaps even at an unsustainable rate. But the next year should, all going well, see more growth, more new experiences, and no doubt more adversity (though hopefully not too much.)

I shall miss the country terribly – its mountains and its gloriously timid wildlife, not to mention its people – but I am also returning home with a renewed sense of vigour about my own country, and I am excited to have many more adventures on European soil. As T. S. Eliot put it, in a verse I return to again and again:

We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.

Ka kite ano au i a koutou.