The Best Decision I Made This Year

I went to the mountains. I took the bus. I ate soup and bread. I was very happy.

Last summer, I went to stay with my grandmother in the countryside for one week. I was very tired before the trip because of my job. At my grandmother's house, I helped her in the garden, cooked, and read books in the afternoon. I didn't use my phone much. The days were slow, but I felt calm. When I came home, I was happier and ready for work again.

This year I started going to bed an hour earlier. It sounds boring, I know, but for me it was hard. I've always been someone who stayed up late, watching TV or reading messages. I was also always tired in the morning. One week I decided to try going to bed at ten. The first few nights I couldn't sleep — my mind was full of thoughts — but by the end of the week, I was waking up before my alarm. Now, months later, my days feel completely different. I'm not a new person. But I am a more awake one, and that has turned out to matter more than I expected.

At the start of this year, I decided to start saying 'no' to things more often. If you know me, you'll know this is not my strong point. I've always been the person who said yes to every dinner, every meeting, every favour, and then privately resented most of them. I thought saying yes made me a good friend. Really, it just made me tired.

The first few 'no's were awful. I was certain people would think I was selfish. One friend was visibly hurt when I cancelled a dinner that, honestly, I didn't have the energy for. I nearly gave in and said yes anyway. I didn't — and the friendship survived, which was slightly humbling.

I haven't become a model of balanced self-care. I still overbook myself some weeks, and I still feel guilty when I shouldn't. But the difference is that, several months in, I'm less tired, my diary is less chaotic, and the people I do see actually get a better version of me. It's not heroic. But it's working.

This year, at some point in early summer, I started walking home from work instead of taking the tube. The decision was not interesting. The journey is about forty minutes, which is not a heroic distance, and the route is nothing special — residential streets, a bit of park, a canal, and then my own front door. I did it, originally, because the tube had become unreliable, and I was late for something specific one Thursday. I didn't mean for it to become a habit.

And yet, somehow, it did. I've walked home most days since then, through various kinds of weather, with various kinds of thoughts in my head. The walk itself is unremarkable. What I've come to notice is how much I had been skipping — the forty quiet minutes between one part of the day and the next, which, it turns out, I had been surrendering every evening to a phone in a crowded carriage.

This is not, I realise, an interesting piece of writing. The walk didn't change my life. I haven't become fitter, or calmer, or any of the things one might hope to claim in exchange for an hour of one's afternoon. What it has done, I think, is give me the small and rather unglamorous experience of arriving home as a person who has had forty minutes to think about absolutely nothing at all, and whose mind is, in consequence, roughly that much more settled than it used to be.

Which sounds so modest, written down, that I almost didn't write it. But these are, increasingly, the small reclaimings I find myself paying attention to. They don't amount to much, individually. They may, taken together, amount to more than I can currently see.

The best thing that happened to me this year was that I lost the notebook I had been keeping for the previous six. This is the sort of opening sentence designed to make a reader lean forward, and I am aware of it, and I flag it here because I would rather be caught performing than caught pretending I am above performance. The notebook was not, in any conventional sense, impressive. It contained shopping lists, disorganised fragments of conversations I had wanted to remember, the occasional vague idea for a book I knew I would never write. Its value, in retrospect, seems to have lain almost entirely in the fact that I had managed to keep hold of it for that long.

I left it on a train in late March. I noticed within about twenty minutes. I did all the things one is supposed to do — contacted the train company, filled out a form, checked the lost-property page for several weeks — and it did not come back. At first, I assumed I would feel some kind of persistent small grief about this, a low-grade mourning for the rolling archive of my own ordinary thinking. In practice, what I felt, once the practical stages had passed, was something more like relief.

That relief has been troubling me, in a pleasant way, ever since.

For a long time — years, probably — I had treated the notebook as something close to a moral obligation. I wrote in it daily, sometimes even when I had nothing to say, as if the act of notation were the thing that justified the day. What I discovered, in its absence, was that nothing much was actually being preserved by this process. My life continued, more or less exactly as before, and did not appear to require a written record in order to remain real.

I am aware that this sounds, written down, like a faintly self-congratulatory story about self-discovery through minor loss, and I am not entirely sure it isn't one. I am writing it, after all, in a format which is itself a lightly more sophisticated notebook. The genre, as they say, always gets you in the end. What I think I can say, with more confidence than most conclusions in the self-reflective essay genre deserve, is that the experience revealed, quietly, how much of what we describe as 'meaningful practice' is in fact a deeply pleasant form of self-management, and how much of our resistance to losing it has less to do with the thing itself than with the version of ourselves we keep alive by doing it.

I have not started a new notebook. I may one day. The relevant point, for now, is that I no longer trust the story in which I would need to.