What the best days of your life are trying to tell you

This is me and my family, out walking. I’m small enough to be on my dad’s back, wrapped up in my yellow duck rain mac and red wellies. My dad looks so young!

I can’t say I remember that exact day in the photograph, but I recognise the feeling it gave me—I was probably at my happiest, even if I didn’t realise it at the time.

When I look back, my formative years are characterised by long days walking through the hillier parts of the UK with my mum, dad, and younger brother. Mud on our boots. Cold biting our fingers. Packed lunches eaten behind rocky outcrops to escape the worst of the wind.

And my goodness, my heart hurts for those days (in the best possible way).

When I find myself in particularly nostalgic moods, just thinking about those times can completely choke me up.

I’ve been reflecting on that recently, because I’m sure that, buried deep down, the days that stick with us reveal something essential about how we connect with ourselves, the world, and each other.

There is something deeply primal about being in the natural world.

When you spend hours walking through hills, fields, forests, and open sky, you slowly remember that you are not separate from what surrounds you. You are part of it. The same forces that shaped the land are shaping you.

Modern life does everything it can to make us feel isolated—from each other, from our bodies, from the Earth. We live in boxes, move from box to box, stare at glowing rectangles. Our nervous systems are constantly frazzled.

But nature softens us.

In wild spaces, your edges become less defined. You stop feeling like a small, stressed individual trying to control everything, and more like a thread in a much larger tapestry.

There is no greater tonic I have found for anxiety and overwhelm than losing myself in the natural world.

I’ve been rereading The Power of Now and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle recently—books that have genuinely changed my life (if you haven’t, please, read them!).

They both point to the same truth: peace lives in presence.

And yet most of us spend very little of our lives actually here. We live in our minds, replaying what’s already happened or worrying about what might, rarely flowing with what’s right in front of us.

Fortunately, walking makes presence unavoidable.

When you’re out on a long walk, you are naturally drawn into what’s happening around you—the crunch of underfoot, the whistling of the wind, the weight of your backpack, the rhythm of your breath.

Your mind may wander, but it keeps getting gently pulled back to what’s right in front of you.

There is a kind of beauty and awe in nature that doesn’t require your usual constant mental narration—it’s registered by the part of you that is simply aware.

There is something profoundly healing about letting sensations pass straight through you without trying to label, judge, or resist them.

The voice in your head quiets, not because you force it to, but because there is always something to pay attention to.

This, I think, is why those days felt so rich.

I wasn’t thinking about my life—I was actually living it.

As a child, walking all day, I didn’t worry about who I should be—I just was.

I wasn’t measuring myself. I wasn’t hyper-conscious about how I looked or what I was achieving or what that person thought of me or whether I was enough.

I wore practical clothes. I put one foot in front of the other. I felt a certain level of joy simply from being alive.

In other words, I had no expectations of the day beyond being in it.

Before I became a “high achiever,” before I learned all the invisible rules about how life should look in order to feel okay inside myself, I knew how to exist without striving.

I didn’t need the day to produce anything. The walking itself was enough.

Everything was just absolutely perfect exactly as it was.

And my gosh, there is true freedom in that.

In theory, some of the happiest days of my life should have been the traditionally big ones—getting my degrees, getting the keys for various houses I’ve lived in, arriving at things I had worked towards for years.

Although those moments were meaningful and I was proud of them, they aren’t the days that stay with me.

Ironically, the ones that do are far more humble.

They are the ordinary days spent walking, talking, being totally silly and unabashed, being soaked by rain, being tired at the end of the day in a thoroughly good way, and being with people I love with nowhere else to be.

There was nothing particularly impressive about them, and they cost nothing in terms of monetary value.

It’s a truth that sounds painfully obvious: experiences matter infinitely more than things.

That’s something I’ve found is easy to know in theory and much harder to live in practice. Life constantly tempts us to chase milestones, status, and accomplishments—things that look important from the outside, but that feel surprisingly hollow every damn time (when will we learn?!).

The life that feels rich is not the one that looks impressive. It’s the one that is shared, simple, and deeply felt.

When I really let that sink in, it changes what I want to prioritise.

When I feel that ache for the hills and the long walks and the simplicity of those years, I don’t think I’m missing the past as much as I’m missing a way of being.

A way of being connected.
A way of being present.
A way of being at ease with myself and the moment.
A way of celebrating the ordinary and the mundane.

And the funny thing is—it’s actually really bloody simple!

It doesn’t require big gestures, expensive trips, or major life changes.

It’s about noticing the small, ordinary moments: spending time with people you love, letting yourself be present, taking a walk without the point being to arrive anywhere, laughing until your stomach hurts.

Maybe that’s the real lesson: the moments that feel most alive are already here. You just have to be willing to allow yourself to let them in.

It reminds me that I must resist the urge to go through life missing everything that’s already right in front of me because I’m waiting for “someday” to be happy or fulfilled.

Have dreams, have goals, by all means—but make it your mission to fall wildly, gleefully, unashamedly in love with your life today, exactly as it is.

Because that is all there ever is.

I’m curious what the best days of your life tell you—or at least what you think they might be hinting at.

If you feel like sharing, reply and tell me. I am delighted to read and respond to every message.

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