2023. It’s been good to me so far. 48 hours in, and I am in a different place to the one I was in when I wrote the previous post. The angst has settled. I feel reconnected to a sense of possibility. All it took was one really hard conversation, in the early hours of the new year. A conversation between Nick and I, in which I could not answer a simple question. All I could do was cry, and tell him that I don’t feel happy in my life, despite all that I have.

And from that conversation, a decision. A simple decision that rang as clear as a bell inside me. I want to walk the Camino de Santiago, and I want to walk it this year, before I turn 40 years old. And despite all the reasons not to – the difficulty of taking over a month off work, being away from Nick and Sophie for a month, having to ask R if he can have Molly for such a long time, not earning money while I am away – despite all of that, at 2am on 1st January, I knew in my bones that this is what I need.

The Camino, a series of paths that have been walked by pilgrims for centuries, is something I’ve wanted to do for years. Three dear friends have walked it, and now, all of a sudden, having thought about it many times in the last few years, it feels like it’s time.

A pattern is emerging in my life. Every 6-9 years, a pilgrimage is born. New Zealand and Australia, 2001-02. Esalen in California, 2009. Iquitos in Peru, 2015. And 2023, the year of my fortieth birthday, a 500 mile walk across the north of Spain.

Nick described it as walking into my forties. I love that. It feels so succinct, and so perfect, and so true. The journey already has my heart. My very own midlife Eat Pray Love. I am so grateful to be with a partner who, not needing certain things himself, is so unwaveringly, unconditionally supportive of me doing them. I have needed a reset for a while. Life has been bountiful, and I have felt run down. The last few years have felt like an uprooting, and a replanting, a time of bedding new roots into the earth. At the same time, I am struggling to bloom. I can’t expect a very long walk to magically transform my life. I don’t want it to. But already I feel more alive, more expansive and connected to a sense of possibility. I plan to set sail (well, to board a plane to Biarritz) in 129 days. And I already cannot wait.