After miles of hill walking, we are sitting against a dry-stone wall high in the Peak District (UK). Four old mates with sandwiches on our laps, laughing so hard my face aches.
We’re all forty-seven now. I’ve known these three men (Charlie, Tom and Christopher) since I was eight years old, and we’re still close.
Long walks with very old friends turns out to be one of life’s great gifts.
The landscape rolls away beneath us for miles, and the familiar banter has us going. I remember thinking, with these people and in that landscape, that there was nowhere on earth I would rather be.
Walking as a ritual
The four of us have walked a different ancient footpath somewhere in the UK every year for the last seven years. We’ve covered a lot of ground and seen a lot of the best the these lands have to offer.
The four of us met at school. But somehow, through all the decades and the jobs and the marriages and the children and the general chaos of grown-up life, we’ve stayed in touch.
And for the last 7 years we kept putting one foot in front of the other together, once a year. It’s steadily become one of our favourite weekends of the year.
Where the walking started
Long walks has been a big part of my life for years now. When I moved to the neolithic south-west of England in 2018 I started heading out on the old pilgrimage routes around Somerset.
These are ancient paths people have walked for thousands of years, past standing stones and burial mounds, in the shadow of places like Glastonbury Tor and Stonehenge.
Not long after my wife and I settled there, I made a strange discovery. The town in Somerset that we’d moved to, Frome, turned out to be my ancestral home (read that story here).
My family had lived on that land for centuries, before immigrating to the US in the late 1300s. I hadn’t known this amazing fact when we chose Frome, and finding out changed how it felt to walk those lands.
In fact, it was that discovery that drew me onto the trails.
Those weren’t just ancient paths anymore, they were paths my ancient ancestors had trodden. The same ground and hills, the same views. The same connection.
So I started walking these paths on purpose, wanting to feel the roots I never knew I had. And as I walked, the lands began to feel genuinely alive to me.
These footpaths gave me something I hadn’t expected. A sense of roots… of being one small link in a very long chain of people who’d crossed the same ground before me.
The joy of barefooting
I like to walk barefoot when I can... not with barefoot shoes. Proper SHOES OFF.
There’s something amazing about feeling the variety of texture of the living land under your feet. Its a delightful sensory experience you lose walking with shoes. The cold wet mud, the soft moss and grass, the sharp stones, the warm rock... all have their own extraordinary felt characteristics.
Let’s not forget, humans evolved to walk barefoot.
Our feet are extraordinary tools, and every time I do six or seven miles without shoes I’m amazed by how resilient my feet turn out to be.
It makes me remember that we spend most of our lives disconnected from the ground by a slab of rubber, called the shoe’s ‘sole’. This separation has come to represent, for me, man’s disconnect from nature.
There’s a lot of research suggesting that direct contact with the earth may help lower inflammation and stress and improve posture amongst other benefits.
What I can tell you for certain is how it feels. It’s a real sensory experience that leaves you with more respect for the earth. It makes you feel grounded and more present with nature.
Walking becoming a healing modality
It’s not only my three old friends I walk with, either. Over the years I’ve walked with all sorts of wonderful mates, and more often than not it’s been with other men.
There’s something about men walking shoulder to shoulder, rather than sitting face to face, that lets men actually break out of their shells and talk.
The rhythm of it and the hours with nowhere to be. Often it’s a much-needed break from the hectic-ness of family life and kids.
Things are spoken on a hillside that would never come out across a table. I’ve watched men work through grief, marriages, their fathers, their fears, all of it, one step at a time.
It might be the most natural therapy there is.
And all these walks are made all the more precious precisely because they won’t go on forever. Each landscape you pass through may be the one and only time you see it.
I started walking barefoot with my kids too. To get them to appreciate nature in this simple but powerful manner. And they love it, especially when you walk in a big group with other families and kids. We used to do one long 8 mile walk each summer and raise money for local charities.
How many more footsteps?
I’m forty-seven. I have no idea how many more walks I will get to make with my three oldest mates. At some point one of us won’t be able to make the hill. But I suspect we’ll keep going for many a year, and I sense that the walking will keep us alive for longer.
Bronnie Ware, the amazing palliative nurse who spent years recording the regrets of the dying, found one that one regret came up again and again…
I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.
Well, there’s no better way to catch up properly and connect with friends than a long walk.
It can become a beloved ritual - an excuse to be together, moving through beautiful country, holding whatever each of us is carrying that year. The griefs. The worries. The joys. All of it said out loud on a hillside in a way it somehow never gets said anywhere else.
One of my favourite philosophers, Ram Dass, once said about life and death that “We’re all just walking each other home.”
I know where I’ll be next summer. On a hill somewhere, barefoot, with three old friends, eating a sandwich, laughing at something daft.
I can’t think of a better way to spend the time we have.
This week’s question:
Who could you start a walking ritual with? Could just be a walk around the park.
Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.
Live happy,
Hoppy
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I am a former CEO & filmmaker, as well as a trained Soul Midwife and Druidic Bard. Aliveness emerged from my own near death experiences, sitting with the dying, and the wisdom of the Stoics, Buddhists and great thinkers on mortality. My dream is that Aliveness will become as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice helping people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and create a more present and generous world.
Love this Hoppy. My old man has done the same thing every year for 40 years. As they say men often talk best when talking isn’t the point.