South West Coast Path: Parts 17.5/18/19
Pentewan Sands - Mevagissey 3km
Falmouth - Helford Passage 16km
Helford - Coverack 18km
Total: 342km 34%
I reached the midway marker. But I wasn’t halfway through my journey. I’ve now completed a third of the South West Coast Path.
I didn’t start at the beginning and I won’t finish at the end. There I was, standing beside a marker that celebrates the middle of something I’m not even halfway through.
Sometimes, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where a journey begins. We revisit old places, circle back to familiar patterns and find ourselves learning lessons we thought we’d already mastered. Sometimes, what feels like an ending turns out to be the beginning of something entirely unexpected. And sometimes, we discover that we’ve travelled much further than we realised, even when we haven’t followed the route we originally imagined.
We’re taught to think of life as linear. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end, with "expected" milestones along the way. Whether that's the career progression, the marriage, the children, the house.
Life is beautifully chaotic, circular, unpredictable and nonlinear. We change direction, we miss the sign, we arrive early, we leave late, take the scenic route or find ourselves somewhere we never intended. Sometimes we make a giant leap forward; sometimes we spend months going round in circles, only to realise that the circle was taking us somewhere after all.
Take the path to Coverack. I needed to follow the path around a quarry. Somewhere along the way, I became distracted. Perhaps by a parasol mushroom, a butterfly or my own thoughts. Whatever the reason, I missed the signs that would have kept me on my intended route.
Instead, I found myself crossing granite stiles and stepping stones, following the path with the sort of blind confidence that suggested I knew where I was going.
Eventually, I found myself at the cemetery of St Keverne.
I love cemeteries - the stories etched into lichen-encrusted gravestones, the messages left by loved ones and the quiet reminders that every life is its own extraordinary, unfinished story. But this wasn’t quite where I was supposed to be.
I was off piste.
I worked out which road would take me back towards the coast path and carried on. As if the universe had decided to reward my navigational incompetence, I discovered that my detour was taking me past Roskilly’s ice creams. The choice I needed to make was clear - Gooseberry and Belgian chocolate double scoop.
Being lost didn’t seem like such a disaster.
I hadn’t ruined the journey. I’d simply wandered away from the route I’d planned and stumbled into something unexpectedly lovely. The destination hadn’t changed, but the experience had become richer for the detour.
Perhaps that’s the point.
What if we stopped treating every deviation from the path as evidence that we’re doing life wrong?
What if the unexpected turns, the false starts, the missed opportunities and the seemingly pointless detours are not interruptions to our lives, but part of living?
We can spend so much time worrying about whether we’re on the right path that we forget to look at the path we’re actually on. We measure ourselves against imaginary timetables and mistake a different route for a failed journey.
We are not machines moving along a production line, each of us expected to reach the same checkpoints in the same sequence. We are living, changing, complicated creatures, shaped by chance opportunities, unexpected losses, new beginnings and decisions we could never have predicted.
Life surprises us. It knocks us sideways. Sometimes it sends us for an ice cream through a cemetery when we thought we were heading towards the sea.
We don’t need to pretend that every detour is wonderful. Some are painful. Some leave us lost for a long time. Some force us to grieve the destination we thought we were heading towards. Not every wrong turn comes with a silver lining.
But we can leave room for the possibility that not knowing where we are going isn’t always a problem to be solved immediately. Sometimes, uncertainty is simply the space in which something new becomes possible.
The universe, after all, doesn’t comply with order. Nature thrives on chaos, on change, adaptation, collisions and unexpected combinations. Order emerges from complexity; new things grow from old things breaking down. Life is constantly becoming something other than it was.
Why should we expect ourselves to be any different?
The art of living isn’t about following a perfectly straight line. Perhaps it’s about learning when to trust the path, when to question it, when to turn back and when to stop resisting the unexpected long enough to notice what it has brought us - ice cream.
Lessons learned:
Embrace the wrong turn
Fave bits:
Paddle at Porthallow
Ferryman at Gillan Creek sharing his story with Duck
October sunshine
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