Keeping perspective when the world’s turned upside down

There is something reassuring about the timelessness of mountains. Of course they, like everything, experience change. Shaped by wind, water, tectonic forces and invisible chemicals, they grow and wither over timescales that we humans can’t fully comprehend, But from a human perspective, they remain more or less the same, no matter what might happen in our own lives. When everything else is changing and out of our control, it is important to remember this.

I have returned to the same mountain again and again over the 22 years of my own life, having been up it for the first time as a baby in a Macpac. While I changed from wellie-clad toddler to hormonal teenager to the overly-enthusiastic hillwalker I am now – while the world around me changed too – Ben Mor Coigach in northwest Scotland has remained exactly the same as ever. Yes, it has its own moods, caused by shifting patterns of weather and light that move fleetingly across its surface, swept on by ferocious Atlantic winds. It shifts from emerald green to winter’s brown with the turn of the seasons. But even these changes are familiar. And the landscape itself, from the glacier-carved ridges to the grains in the Torridonian sandstone, remains unchanged with each return visit. Whenever I was having a hard time at high school, my mother used to tell me that Ben Mor Coigach was inside me. Conjuring a mental image of the mountain, visualising each and every stone and tuft of grass, reminded me that it was still there, and always would be. Ben Mor Coigach strength was a part of me, as steady and constant as the stars.

Right now, most of us can’t get to the mountains. This is just one of many restrictions that have been placed on our lives right now – and rightly so. I was lucky enough to happen to be in the Cairngorms during the week that the restrictions started to come in, having got there before the Prime Minister banned non-essential travel, and before people started flocking to the hills to escape the cities. We got back just in time, a few days before the country locked down completely. Those last few days of freedom roaming the emptiness of the Cairngorms were some of the most surreal I have ever experienced. In the space of a few days, I had been told that I would not be returning to University for my final term; that the conservation training scheme I was applying for had been cancelled; and that I would not be able to see my friends or boyfriend again for an unknown period of time. But in the vastness of the mountains, it was hard to believe that anything had changed. Pausing in a sun-touched valley at the end of a perfect day, I realised that this place hadn’t changed at all in response to the coronavirus outbreak. The rough grasses, trembling in the breeze, and the ice-laden river rumbling through the glen, carrying mountain secrets out to sea, were blissfully unaware that the world had fallen apart – and for a moment, so was I.

We all need Ben Mor Coigach strength inside us right now. When things seem hard, imagine your own Ben Mor Coigach inside you – perhaps for you, it is a quiet grassy spot by a beloved river, or a favourite tree in a park. Perhaps it is another mountain, somewhere out there under the endless sky. Visualise every line of that familiar place, and breathe yourself into it: imagine yourself lying there, the whisper of air against your face, the smells and sounds pouring into you. And remember that that place is not just inside you, but still really there, right now, immune to coronavirus and unchanged. It will always be there to welcome you back.