A little while ago I decided to walk the coastal path from Llandonna Beach to Beaumaris. I am a slightly adventurous man, but this was pretty big for me. I got up at dawn and walked for six hours. All I thought I needed was to keep the coast to my left.
Yeah, no. That’s not how it happened. The path winded across beaches, up hills, and deep inland. But all the way, yellow and blue signs with a seagull on them told me where to go.
Sometimes, just sometimes, the signs were too far apart, and on one occasion the sign had fallen over, and pointed straight into the ground. And another time the sign was fine, but pointed directly through a swamp.
And so I have a question, when I ended up walking into a large field with no exit, or across a swamp. Was it because there weren’t enough signs? Was it because I wasn’t experienced enough? Or is getting a bit lost the kind of thing we need to expect, embrace, and enjoy?
I think it’s all three. But what I find most interesting is it’s not the 40 perfect signs that stay with me – it’s the fallen one
A fallen sign
The fallen sign was no one’s fault. It happens. But it was still official. Still yellow and blue. The seagull was still there, doing its seagull thing. It just wasn’t upright. It was pointing confidently into the dirt, which is technically a direction, but one I couldn’t follow
I stood over it for a while. And I realised that a fallen sign is worse than no sign. No sign tells you that you are on your own. A fallen sign tells you someone has assessed the situation and said there’s a better way to go, but you now don’t know that.
I feel this personally. The sign fell over. Nobody noticed. And everyone who came after had to make their best guess. Maybe a guide would have been better. But wait, that reduces the adventure, and I was looking for adventure. So then maybe the third way is right – you can have your signs, and a guide to help you if you like, but sometimes you need to take all the best advice you can, and then just move where you feel is right. Sure you might walk round the odd field, but that’s a part of the plan we accept in advance.
The gaps between signs
The gaps between signs are a different problem, and an honest one.
Some stretches of the path are well marked. You barely have to think. And then, you’re in a field with five possible exits and no indication of which one continues the path and which one ends at someone’s back garden.
This is not a failure of the signs that exist. It is an acknowledgment that you cannot anticipate every junction. Some stretches of any journey, in walking and in business, are simply under-mapped. The information does not exist in the exact way you need it. Other people approached this point and knew what to do.
What you do in those gaps matters more than what you do on the well-signed stretches. You look for context. You use what you know. You make a decision and you commit to it, because standing still in a field is its own kind of lost.
And then there is the swamp.
I am not sure any sign would have helped with the swamp. It was just there, between me and where I was going, and the only real options were through it or a long way round it.
I went through it. My boots were wet for two hours.
I have thought about this less than the other two and that’s interesting in itself. Because the swamp was nobody’s fault. It wasn’t a planning failure or a sign failure or an experience failure. It was just the terrain. And the terrain is sometimes like that.
Some problems, especially business ones, are swamps. They are not there because of bad strategy or poor direction or insufficient guidance. They are just in the way. The only question is whether you go through or go round, and both answers are legitimate depending on how much you care about dry boots.
So, was it the signs, or my experience, or is getting lost just part of it?
Yes.
The fallen sign was a thing on the journey we have to overcome. The gaps were an honest reflection of a path that cannot anticipate everything. The swamp was just the swamp.
The walk from Llandonna to Beaumaris took six hours. I got lost twice, wet once, and saw absolutely no one else. I will remember it for a long time.
I knew where I was going. I just didn’t always know how I was going to get there. I loved it.
