WHEN YOU LET YOUR HEART LEAD THE WAY
By Alison Petty | Coaching
This was a great life moment for me in 2023, celebrating on the summit of Haystacks in the Lake District halfway through what turned out to be 57.7 miles of hill walking over four days.
I suspect anyone who knows me from my twenty-four years living with ME and Fibromyalgia will be surprised by this achievement. I know I regularly surprise myself even though I am now eight years fully recovered all thanks to the brain training program called the Lightning Process.
Scenes like this though, now pepper my life which is a reality I am truly grateful for. I usually set out on walks with a rough idea of what the day will look like and how far I’ll go. These days I can happily hike anywhere between 12 and 20 miles. On this trip though, I wanted to see how I would fare with back-to-back days of long walks. In part, so I could start planning long hiking trips with confidence but mostly because I just love to walk. It’s the journey, the moving through places to reach the end destination that makes me put on my hiking boots and go.
I remember hoping I would have it in me to go far over multiple days but this was a first for me so of course, my mind started to get in the way. The fear of ‘what if I can’t’, began to kick in. But of course, ‘I could’.
The author Roy T. Bennett wrote, ‘Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.’
Wise words for hiking and wise words for life.
I didn’t have a plan. I just set out to walk and take in the summits I felt most drawn to on the day. You could say that I was letting myself be led by my heart which served me well because the next thing I knew I was feeling triumphant at the end of those glorious four days in the Lakes.
So while there’s a lot to be said for setting goals, there’s also a lot to be said for just setting out with the healthy mindset of ‘let’s just see what happens!’. Who knows where you’ll end up but if you let yourself be led by the dreams in your heart then surely you will also end up somewhere feeling triumphant.