Adventure Begins Today

Whenever I’m halfway up a steep hill or climbing a mountain, I always have to stop at least once.

Yes, it’s partly (or, if I’m being completely honest, mostly) because I need to catch my breath. But it’s also because we’re often so focused on reaching the top that we forget to turn around and appreciate the view we’ve already earned. We become so obsessed with what’s still ahead that we miss the beauty of everything we’ve left behind. And life is no different.  We’re constantly chasing the next goal, the next milestone, the next adventure. In doing that, we often forget to celebrate just how far we’ve already come.

When I sat down on New Year’s Eve and booked the trip of a lifetime to South America before handing in my resignation from my safe, stable full-time job, all that lay ahead was uncertainty. And I loved it.

For the first time as an adult, I didn’t have a carefully mapped-out plan. I had no idea what came next, and somehow that felt incredibly freeing.

January, February and March passed in a blur. Working my notice felt like being on a train hurtling through station after station, barely stopping long enough to catch my breath. By the end of March, I felt as though I’d made no real progress at all. Looking back now, though, that’s far from the truth.

In those three months I qualified as a WALX (Nordic walking) instructor. I also made the huge decision to come off my anti-anxiety medication. At the time, I don’t think I truly appreciated what an enormous achievement coming off the tablets was – I’d come so far from the burnt out person I was in 2023.

April and May were spent travelling around South America, and honestly, it still feels like a dream. I absolutely loved it (although I’d happily have skipped the altitude-induced allergic rhinitis). More importantly, I felt like myself again – more than I had in years.

Coming home, however, was harder than I admitted. Reality has a funny way of arriving with a thud, and I wasn’t quite ready to return to being a responsible adult. Naturally, my solution was perfectly sensible…I decided to spend the rest of my travel budget on a second trip of a lifetime to Southern Africa.  Considering I’ve been talking about going to Botswana ever since I came back from Namibia in 2017, it actually felt long overdue.

Then June arrived and it was somewhere during that sixth month of the year that I realised something important. I’d achieved far more than I’d been giving myself credit for. From the outside, it probably looked like I’d spent most of the month watching grass-court tennis, Netflix and Prime. And yes… there was definitely some of that.

But alongside it, I launched not one but two businesses – even one business wasn’t even on my radar on New Year’s Eve. Even more surprisingly, both have already welcomed their first paying clients (don’t get too excited though as neither are going to make me a millionaire in my lifetime).  I’ve also made huge progress towards becoming an accredited coach, caught up with friends I’d not seen in far too long, spent precious time with my mum and dad in North Yorkshire, and even squeezed in a trip to Sunderland to see Take That.

So not a bad six months, really.

All of this is a rather long-winded way of saying that time has a habit of racing past. When we’re busy looking towards our destination, it’s easy to convince ourselves that we’re standing still.  More often than not, though, we’ve travelled much further than we realise.

Is the future still daunting? Absolutely.

Who knows whether I’ll make a success of working for myself?

Who knows whether I’ll build the life spent coaching others in nature I’m dreaming of?

Who knows whether there might come a time when I need support again and decide to go back on anti-anxiety medication?

I don’t have the answers to any of those questions.

But I do know this.

If I stop halfway up the hill that is 2026 and turn around to look behind me, I can already see just how much ground I’ve covered.

And that’s enough to remind me that I’m more than ready to keep climbing, wherever the second half of the year takes me (after a little trip to Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana and Zimbabwe) 🙂