I’m sitting in Gatwick airport, having paid far too much for an unsatisfactory breakfast made worse by my own indecision about what I actually wanted. Around me, people mill about in the gentle hubbub of the departures hall, the hum of fans, chatter, excited exclamations, laughter, the clink of plates. I’m waiting for my gate to be called, waiting for the journey to properly begin. To be on the pilgrimage trail towards St Benedict in Montecassino, to finish what I started three years ago. The greens will be all the more vibrant than they were in July, the mountain flowers blooming more than before, but the air will be as fresh as it has always been.

This is a trip I’ve long looked forward to — one I feel, deep down, that I need, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Amongst all this noise and movement, I feel ever so slightly nervous and anxious, and again, I’m not sure what about. Perhaps it is the heightened vulnerability, or perhaps what I will find in my own company.

I know this walk has a way of moving me in unexpected ways. I feel as though I need the walk, the landscape, to do something to my interior life, something I don’t yet know I need.  There is a restlessness in me, which I hope to calm. The kind of restlessness that isn’t cured by doing more, but perhaps by doing less — by walking, by silence, by simply moving through a landscape with no purpose other than to arrive. 

As I prepare to leave this country for another, and find myself longing to walk the mountains alone, I wonder why. Why, when I am alone so much of the time, do I long to be alone even more? Is it stillness I’m yearning for? 

I suppose airports are liminal places, much as I find myself in life. Between the now and the proposed relocation of my life next year, not in one place or another. And then there is the space between death and goodbye. My final grandparent departed just a couple of days ago, aged 91. She had always been there — fading over the last decade, but still present, her character still shining through. 

Soon I will pass through that landscape, and for a while at least, I will simply be where I am.