A while ago I was on my afternoon lap of the country roads when I passed a girl who was about sixteen. She had her ear buds in but she looked up a beamed broadly at me, a smile I recognised as the one I always used to do to signal to grown ups that I wasn’t one of the scary teenagers, I was a good one. As I smiled back the thought in my head was “god I wish I could switch places with you”.

Launching The Cabin has shown me the problem with fulfilment. Well, not fulfilment itself, but talking about it. I have found it hard to talk about fulfilment because it is so “is that it?”.

Maybe you find this. The desire for fulfilment to be something more than just what you want. The expectation that it is this magical thing glinting on a hill top, and then the disappointment when you find that it's just… doing more of what you want to be doing.

I deserve what I desire. This is an affirmation I have started writing every morning, after listening to Jamie Varon’s book and her belief in the power of affirmations. I’ve never really been one for affirmations, but I do know that the science behind “tell yourself something is true often enough and you’ll believe it” is solid, so I am having a go at it. Seeing what happens.

I hadn’t realised until this year just how impatient I am. It must have always been there but perhaps I mistook it for something else: ambition, perhaps, or hustling. Looking back now I see my years of longing to be “further forward” and the frustration that I was “not there yet” to be symptomatic of my great capacity for impatience.

have become allergic to effort.

There was a seven minute gap between writing the end of that sentence and beginning this one, precisely because it was effort to think about what to write next. When I talk with my friend Jen about business growth ideas and things we could do more often than not my conclusion is “that would be good but honestly I can’t be arsed”.

Sunlight makes all the difference. I emerged into Q2 as if crawling out of a dank cave, and for a while I had to just lie there and soak up some light before getting to my feet. With the lengthening days came, on the whole, an uplift of mood and an end to the waiting – for green, for light, for life – of the previous three months.

Last summer I had the phrase “redirecting ambition into a life worth living” pop into my head. This was when I knew I had to shift my business towards something that worked better for me, but also had no idea what that direction would be. So driving along that summer afternoon I repeated the phrase over and over so I wouldn’t forget it before I could stop and write it down.

A lot of “ways to live your best life” are rituals. Morning routines. Evening routines. Tea ceremonies. Journaling practice. Candles. Baths. Standing in a forest. Breathwork. These are all things that are enticing to me, all things that at various stages over the last five years I’ve tried or thought about trying, all things I thought were missing.

I have been thinking about devotion. In fact, it was a strong contender for my word of the year, being just pipped at the post eventually (a decision that feels like six weeks, not six months, ago).

Be here. Be here, be here, be here. This is the refrain that I’ve come to tell myself when I’m too much in my head. Often I am my most present on a walk in the hills, but even there I can sometimes find myself an hour in and realising I haven’t been there at all. I haven't really seen anything, I haven’t heard any birds, I haven’t been living in this life - I’ve been somewhere else entirely.

You may have heard, I’m a writer now. I go into more detail in this podcast episode, but long story short, that’s the job title I’ve now given myself, and the role I’m working to. But as much as this was something I wanted, something I was excited about, there was a problem - a problem of value. I couldn’t join up in my head how my role as a writer would be valuable enough to anyone else for them to buy the things I wrote.

I’d booked a table for dinner at 7pm, ludicrously early by Portuguese standards, and maybe that was part of it – knowing I was just a table for one and not wanting to take up the prime dinner tables later on in the evening. At this time there were fewer fellow diners to watch, and so I pulled out a book while I waited for my food.

My first day in Lisbon I was a little wobbly. I am staying at a co-living space, and although I have my own room and bathroom, the kitchen and living space is shared and there is just that dominating sense of there being people around which I am unused to. My first morning as I hear the sounds of breakfast spoons on bowls I feel so self-conscious I don’t even want to blow my nose.

When I think about Q1 I think about being very cold and very sad. I think of myself in my, ironically, bright yellow cheery coat, stomping down damp roads wondering why someone doesn’t want me. I think about the intricate timings of hot water bottles and plug in radiators to transition from being cold downstairs to being not so cold in bed. I think about dreaming and wishing and longing so hard for so many things.

I have, for some weeks now, put on my weekly list “Elidir Fawr”. Elidir Fawr is a mountain my end of the valley, one that I see more or less every time I leave the house, one that I look at now from the ladder stile on which I am writing this. In fact, here’s a picture:

It is wild, to watch while someone chooses not to be in love with you. They were right there with you on the edge, sharing smiles as the wind picks at your hair - but then they start to peel away. The endless lists of “we should go here”s turn into ignored invitations and un-followed-up “I'm busy”s.

I remember battling with this question of hope a year ago, in much the same situation: isolated at winter with a broken heart. It has re-emerged, now and again, over the last twelve months, this question of whether having hope actually makes things a lot worse.

There are times when we are the victims of our own assumptions. We assume someone is going to behave in a certain way, we assume things will go the way they did last time, we assume that our plans will “work” and go exactly as we imagine. And then they don’t and we are left with two problems: reacting to things not going as we’d planned, and grieving our assumptions.

In 2019, my Word of the Year was Fulfilment. That didn’t work out so well for me. I had set it with the expectation that that was all I needed to do; speak and it would be so. The Word, along with a Pinterest vision board, would be enough, and then something would happen and I would become fulfilled. It would be three more Januarys until I would be.

In previous years I have written great long lists of intentions for the impending 12 months, swathes of minutely specific targets to reach and broader ways in which my thinking is going to be transformed. I decided precisely how the year would pan out, colour coding projects into each month in a spreadsheet that maps onto my financial projections for the year.