Life Happens Outside

Notes from a week of hiking and forgetting my phone

Hi friends (and sorry for dropping the ball on this newsletter; life crept in around the edges for a while).

Today I feel like writing about a recent revelation: Life happens outside.

A few weeks ago, I managed to take a rare week away from work and spent it hiking in the Pyrenees mountains (on the Spanish side), without much of a plan beyond the vague intention to walk a lot and be outside for as many hours of daylight as my legs would allow.

I didn’t frame it as a reset or a break or a chance to “reconnect” with anything in particular, but I could feel, in a way that was more bodily than intellectual, that something in my internal rhythm was off, and that leaving my usual environment might help restore a sense of balance.

Conscious Vacationing (A bad name for a good instinct)

I’ve been half-jokingly referring to the week as “conscious vacationing,” which is a terrible term and one I regret almost as soon as I say it out loud, but the instinct behind it felt real enough. I knew going into the trip that my mental state had become fragmented in a way that was starting to feel unsustainable: too much time behind a screen, too much ambient anxiety from work and politics and social media, and too many half-formed thoughts competing for attention without ever fully resolving into anything useful.

So before leaving, I deleted the louder apps from my phone: Instagram (you evil culprit!!!), X, the usual suspects.. not as an act of self-control so much as a way of lowering the volume on everything at once. I didn’t replace them with meditation apps or productivity tools or anything designed to optimise the experience. I just removed the noise and trusted that whatever remained would be enough to occupy my attention.

Day One: Walking Without Documenting

The first hike was a solo one. I put my phone on flight mode and buried it at the bottom of my backpack, partly to avoid temptation and partly because I didn’t yet trust myself not to reach for it out of habit. I didn’t take photos, not out of principle, but because I didn’t want the day to turn into a process of documentation, or future-proofing the experience for some later version of myself. I wanted to stay with it as it was happening, without the subtle pressure to translate it into something shareable.

At first, my mind kept reaching for something that wasn’t there. The reflex to check, to scroll, to fill the small gaps between moments. But gradually, slowly enough that I only noticed it in hindsight, my breathing settled, my pace found its own rhythm, and the constant background chatter softened into something a bit more spacious.

Day Two: Conversation and Forgetting Lunch

The next day, I hiked with my dear friend Pascal, on a longer route with more elevation. There was loads of free-flowing conversation that seems to emerge naturally when you’re walking side by side for hours, without eye contact, without an agenda. We talked about work and relationships and uncertainty and the future, but in a way that felt exploratory rather than problem-solving, as if the act of walking itself removed the pressure to arrive at conclusions.

Somewhere along the trail, I noticed that my internal posture had shifted slightly. That familiar sense of being braced against the world started to ease without me having consciously asked it to. My view of things felt wider, less urgent, as though my nervous system had remembered that not everything requires immediate interpretation (It helped being surrounded by the beautiful views of autumn colours and endless hills)

We reached the summit with the intention of having lunch, only for me to realise, too late, that I’d forgotten the entire lunch bag back at the lodge. This is something that would normally irritate me far more than it did. We laughed, sat on a rock anyway, and took in the view. Hunger, it turned out, was negotiable.

Day Three: Recalibrating Attention

The third day was the biggest hike of the trip, with more challenging terrain, lingering ice and snow on the trail, and signs warning of recent rock falls. We climbed toward the French border, near that high-altitude ski resort whose name I can never quite remember, pushing higher and further than the previous days, and by that point something had fully shifted.

My brain no longer instinctively reached for my phone during breaks; there was no phantom buzz, no background sense of having forgotten something important. My attention had recalibrated itself without effort. I was immersed in the very practical realities of the moment, watching my footing, feeling the strain in my legs, listening to water move through the valleys below.

Life Happens Outside

That’s kind of when it hit me: Life happens outside.

Not in a romantic or escapist sense, and not as an argument against work or ambition or technology, but as a quiet recalibration of scale. The things that usually dominate my mental bandwidth when I’m behind a laptop: emails, slack, timelines, online debates, metrics, opinions, didn’t vanish so much as they shrank, revealing how inflated they had become in the absence of any real counterweight.

Sitting beside a stream, watching water move exactly as it has for thousands of years, made it difficult to maintain the illusion that most of my daily concerns required the level of attention I’d been giving them.

Day Four: Stillness

By the fourth day, my legs were wrecked, so I didn’t hike. I moved slowly, read a little, sat around, and let boredom arrive and pass without trying to fill it. There was no big insight, no sense of closure, just an unremarkable feeling of being alright where I was.

Somewhere in that stillness, the urge to write returned. It came back because I stepped outside long enough to let everything else fall back into its proper place.

Much love <3