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to. Life was good.

    One thing I learned very quickly on JoGLE is the inestimable value of a day off.
    A day off provides you with necessary rest for your tender feet and tired body. It relieves you of the morning chore of taking down your tent and the evening chore of setting it up again. It gives you time to wash and dry your clothes, to stock up on groceries, to plan the next stage of your journey, and even to lounge around reading a novel or listening to music.
    It’s an oasis of ease and comfort.
    To the non-walker, it may sound strange to hear a day spent camping in a backpacker tent, catching up on laundry, and shopping for groceries described as an oasis of ease and comfort.
    But comfort is a relative concept.
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, wrote: ‘What the English call “comfort” is something inexhaustible and illimitable. Others can reveal to you that what you take to be comfort at any stage is discomfort, and these discoveries never come to an end.’
    He was absolutely right.
    For example, when you sleep every night in a backpacker tent, your idea of comfort is a hostel bed, a proper cooker, and a table and chairs. When you sleep every night in a hostel, your idea of comfort is your own little house with its own little kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. When you live in your own little house, your idea of comfort is a big house with a designer kitchen, more en-suite bedrooms than you know what to do with, and a double garage.
    And even when you have all of that, you still find yourself hankering after further comforts: better TVs, faster broadband, reclining armchairs, plusher carpets . . .
    However much you have, you will always want more.
    This insatiable hunger for ever-greater levels of comfort is fuelled, in large part, says Hegel, by ‘others’, by the people around you who have bigger, better, nicer stuff than you do, and by the advertisers whose mission in life is to convince you that nobody in their right mind could possibly be content with the stuff you have right now.
    Epicurus understood that. That’s why he and his disciples moved outside the city, away from ‘others’ and out of temptation’s way.
    Epicurus also understood that you pay for your comforts. And not just with money. You pay for them with long hours at the office, work-related stress, frenetic family life, and lack of time and energy for the things that really interest you.
    Far better, he argued, to learn to be content with what is sufficient rather than to be constantly striving for more. ‘Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little,’ he said.
    Or, as Gensei put it, ‘The point in life is to know what’s enough.’

If one keeps on walking, everything will be alright.
    —Kierkegaard, Letter to Henrietta

Chapter Three
    Open Spaces
    Fort William – Kinlochleven – King’s House Hotel – Tyndrum – Inverarnan – Rowardennan – Drymen – Milngavie
     
    The road between John o’Groats and Inverness is almost unremittingly dull. The Great Glen Way, like the curate’s egg, is good in parts. But the West Highland Way is sublime.
    It runs ninety-six miles from Fort William to Milngavie, near Glasgow, through some of the wildest, remotest, and loveliest parts of the Scottish Highlands. It meanders through pastoral landscapes, passes between rugged peaks, stretches across desolate moors, cuts through leafy forests, and runs beside serene lochs.
    It attracts seventy-five thousand visitors a year, of which thirty thousand walk the entire trail. But you’d never know it. You pass other walkers now and then, but in the main you have the mountains, the moors, the forests, and the lochs to yourself.

    Our first day’s walk on the West Highland Way took us thirteen miles from Fort William to Kinlochleven , a none-too-pretty village, prettily situated on the eastern side of Loch Leven, and surrounded on three sides by mountains.
    An hour or so into the