Walking to reflect

Looking back as we wind down toward the end of the year

Taking a moment to reflect

Hello again. Blimey, is it December already? Everything seems to speed up at this time of year, doesn’t it? There are deadlines to meet, people to greet and mince pies to eat. It’s also a time when emails go into overdrive, so to give your inbox a breather, this’ll be our last walk of the year.

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Walking

This edition is about taking a moment to pause, catch our breath and look back at the year and what it’s brought us. So I’d like our last walk of the year to be simple, gentle and thoughtful.

Treat it as a moment of calm during what is often a frenetic time of year. Leave your phone at home, or switch it off, and take a slow walk alone with your thoughts – it’s as simple as that.

As you walk, reflect on the year. The highs, the lows and everything in between. If it helps to focus on something specific, try one or more of the prompts below to think about as you walk:

• The thing I’m most proud of this year is…

• I’m most grateful for…

• The biggest hurdle I overcame was…

• The thing that made me the happiest this year was…

Writing

We’ll follow up our reflective walk with some reflective writing. This type of writing helps you to focus on an experience and analyse what happened and how it made you feel, so you can learn from it and consider what you might do as a result. It’s fairly easy to do, but here are some tips:

• You can either reflect on something that came to mind during your walk, or choose one of the prompts above.

• Write from your own perspective – use ‘I’ rather than ‘you’ or ‘we’.

• Write what comes to you naturally and let your words flow rather than trying to force it.

• Describe the experience using phrases like ‘I think’, ‘I felt’ or ‘I learned’.

• Analyse the experience, for example, ‘I learned A, B or C because of X, Y or Z’.

• Write down what you’ll do as a result of the experience you’ve reflected on.

I hope you find this walking and writing prompt helpful. If you’d like to share how it went then please add a comment – I love hearing your feedback on these posts.

And if you’d like to explore more walks and writing prompts over the holidays, have a look at The Writer’s Walk archive. It’s building up quite nicely, so you can dip in and out of posts like walking with a friend over the phone, walking with your nose, walking in colour, and more.

Thanks for walking and writing with me this year. See you again in January.

Sarah