I mean, I’ve had a holiday last year where I was hiking for days, often meeting no one except for the group I was with.

That was hard from a certain perspective, it involved some technically difficult climbing, lots of different terrain, carrying your own supplies.

But I honestly found it a lot easier to just walk, one foot in front of the other, for hours and hours, than to organise my normal life. It was meditative, in a way.

Now I’m not saying that I’m some kind of pioneer, the people in those wagons didn’t have mapped out places to refill their water, and I didn’t have small children, diseases, or displacing natives along my route to do that I had to worry about, but I am saying that the clarity of purpose that just walking towards a destination for days on end can feel really freeing.