The end of the year has got us in a reflective mood. As you’ll probably know, we spent a big chunk of 2017 walking a casual 2,000km to Rome. Managing to actually do this made us think about walking in an entirely new way; heck, about life in a new way.

Because we’ve realised that the two things are weirdly linked. Have you noticed that walking is used as an analogy for life ALL THE TIME? It’s ‘the walk of life’. You ‘step into the unknown’. She is on a ‘career path’. He’s really ‘hitting his stride’…

Well, don’t we find this interesting. It made us think that maybe the things we learned about achieving and completing our walk might also be applicable to getting on in life.

Because let us tell you: the mental side of walking proved at least as challenging as the physical side. Maybe even more.

So after a bit of thought, here are our 9 life lessons from walking  a very long way:

1. Nothing is forever. And that can be good

That might sound morbid for an uplifting life lessons list, but it can actually be the most liberating thing. On the walk we slept in a different place pretty much every night. Some of them were awesome, some were weird, some were just awful. But it almost didn’t matter: each one was interesting, vivid, kinda funny to remember.

And we could think like that because we knew it was just one night: we would be off and away in the blink of an eye. It made us appreciate the wonderful weirdness of each and every situation.

Now imagine applying that to your life. Always keeping in mind that whatever you’re living through, you are moving through it, it doesn’t define your life. It puts a whole different lens on things, and weirdly makes you live both more in the present and rise above it.

2. To trust that sometimes you DON’T know what’s good for you

When we travelled the world in the past we caught buses, trains, and planes all over the place, cramming in all the places the internet told us were worth seeing. It was cool, but exhausting.

Slow travel showed us something different. We weren’t just bulldozing our way to the places that we thought we had to see, but instead could just …. Be. Walking allows the world to just flow around us, and we found things you never knew about. Things you didn’t even think to look for.

It was an incredible way to travel, and we were barely getting anywhere at all.

Instead of hurtling towards a place you think you want to be, look around at the everyday life you’re passing through, and just  s l o w  r i g h t  d o w n  to enjoy it. Getting to the end isn’t the sum total of life.

3. YOU DON’T NEED ALL THAT MUCH

We should probably just let this cliché hang there – but it is, in fact, true.

4. You can’t tell what’s going to be tough – be kind

We would start each day by tracing the route on the map. We’d see the red line dip and curl and wind through the landscape. Sometimes you could see there would be a big climb, a tough bit you could brace yourself for.

But sometimes the littlest part of the red line would be unforeseeably difficult. The surface would be impossible to walk on, or it could be really slippy with rain, or you could just be really, really tired. It happened all the time.

From your bird’s eye view of life you sometimes don’t realise how hard a little part of it is going to be. Don’t give yourself a hard time if you thought it was going to be easy and it isn’t. Lots of things are going on at once, you know. So…be kind to yourself.

Life lessons

 

5. Anxiety is a bit useless

Okay, this is one just from Nell. But for huge sections of the walk, I was living three different lives.

a) The one that I painted in my head. There’d be stunning landscapes, dappled sunshine, and birdsong.
b) The real one, which had a bit of a) but we weren’t nearly as stylish as I’d like, and there were more ugly roads. And then
c) where something disastrous was imminently about to happen. Everywhere, always.

This was particularly bad in the mountains when there were trickyish sections to tackle. Every step I imagined one of us rolling an ankle, miles from anywhere. Or toppling off the path into a ravine. Someone might steal our phones, or break our camera. I would detail to Luke exactly how this stretch of path COULD destroy us both. I was really impressively imaginative.

But it never happened. And I wasted a TON of energy dreading stuff. It didn’t make it better, or less likely to happen, or me any happier either. Noted.

6. Your body works

This isn’t a neat life analogy, this is just fact. Doing the walk, we were the leanest and fittest we’d ever been. We also still had exactly the same bodies we had when we started.

There might have been a part of our bodies that we didn’t like, that we hoped would be magicked away by all the STRIDING. And yes, wobbly bits got smaller, but y’know the actual parts were still the same – your tummy was still your tummy, your legs the same legs.

And that’s when you realise that those bits are obviously important contributors to your body actually functioning; it all worked together to get where you needed to be. Our bodies worked overtime to make it to Rome – we mean really, they pulled some mega shifts. And that included our least favourite body parts too.

We realised then that your body really is your best buddy. Those head, shoulders, knees and toes will do anything for you until the day they literally curl up and die. Now we respect that a bit more.

7. You’re in it now, so be in it 100%

Unless you’re going to give up, thinking negatively just pushes you backwards. When ‘we can’t do this, we can’t do this,’ is the constant drum beat you’re marching to, it’s an almost painful experience. Either stop pushing entirely and do something else, or NEVER stop pushing. Do that and eventually…

8. Oh, we can

Walking had taught us to keep going. Just that: keep going, every day. Because even on bad days we were never very far from good ones, but if on that bad day we had sunk under the weight and stopped, we would have never gotten out of that dark moment. You must keep going, even if it seems unlikely. Because:

9. The most powerful thing in life is your drive

Good Luck. Bad luck. Place, timing. Coincidence. All kinds of external stuff forces its way in to the life course you take. That certainly happened when we were walking (insert infected hornet sting/lightning storm/weird men as appropriate).

But nothing matters as much as your own hard won, steam-powered will to keep going, and get ‘there’. To overcome. That really is the life force of everything. Shuddering determination really is THE thing.

Our best of all the life lessons from walking and thought for 2018: that (actually) you can.

Life lessons

What do you think of our life lessons from walking? We think there’s plenty in there about confidence, self love, achievement and just learning to breathe it all in. Do these mean anything to you? Has walking, travel, or exercise ever taught you anything? Please share with us!