To Stoically Go

Hanging with Boro 

My friend Boro thought everything I did was hilariously inept, and he made sure I knew this.  His sense of humour was sharp and dry, and I looked forward to seeing him each morning at the school where he lived. Boro had the aura of an old man, chuckling at his own latest joke. Once he saw me trying to run up a hill, and “FUGIT, SANEY FUGIT!” (run Janey, run – the kiddos called me Saney) was the next few days’ joke.

Boro, and the other kids at the school, had been adopted from the state orphanage across the road. The orphanage was still full of 2- to 17-year-olds; at 18 they’d transfer to care homes for the elderly. Summers 2001 and 2002 I worked mostly in the orphanage, helping look after a dozen younger kids who rarely left the single room where they ate, slept, and lined up, rocking, on potties for hours at a time.  The nurses tied the most disruptive kids to the radiators. Most were not technically “orphans”, but had been taken into, or left in, state care. Often, because of medical problems or disability, or a harelip, or because siblings were starving and the orphanage fed kids daily, or because of life-threatening domestic violence (doll play in the orphanage sometimes involved some harrowing re-enactments).

Institutionalisation can cause symptoms of autism, rendering kids non-verbal, self-stimulatory, unable to communicate. In 2001, I worked so hard to coax words from the kiddos, sometimes hearing a heartbreaking “mama” after several weeks.
I took them outdoors, and when their (literally) rickety legs gave up I lifted the kiddies onto my shoulders and obeyed their orders to walk, run or oh-so-carefully jump.  When I went back in 2002, some kids had started talking (again); some had stopped talking (again). Some had stopped hitting themselves and others; some had worked on their uppercuts instead of their words. Some were no longer around.

When I got back to the UK in 2001, I decided that none of the problems in my own life were worth complaining about. Objectively, they’re still not. I still have the occasional whinge when my car breaks down, or my arm hurts, or I’m just ridiculously broke. But then I think, what would Boro say? I really have no excuse for whining.

This relates to the trail, I promise. From my months in Romania, from walking nearly 200 miles across the UK, and from myriad other stuff, I’ve become pretty stoic (lower-case), but more recently Stoic (capital S). Oliver Burkeman defines the first as a kind of “weary, uncomplaining resignation”. Stoicism, as a philosophy, is “far more tough-minded, and involves developing a kind of muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances” and finding “unforeseen benefits lurking within” what appear to be uncomfortable, embarrassing or otherwise unpleasant experiences (Burkeman, p.24). If being stoic gets me through daily life sometimes, I think being Stoic will help me along the trail. When I’m inwardly whining about the gradient the bugs the slippery rocks the unfavourable weather the chafing … I’ll think of Boro wheezing with laughter at the bottom of the hill. Fugit-Saney-fugit indeed – Boro wouldn’t let me quit on an ascent.

A couple of years after this photo was taken, Boro passed away. I miss him.