Becca, I love this.

Three weeks ago I spent just four days, alone, on an isolated, empty campsite in North Norfolk, walking the marshes before sunrise and the beaches at lunchtime. It was specifically to get some space from my life, also in London, a city that I love.

I was struck by how incredibly quickly the time disappeared. In between sourcing or preparing my meals, time just disappeared, the days melting away through a background of quite surprisingly enlightening introspection. That instrospection was not without it’s fears, but there was nowhere to turn from those fears, every time I averted my eyes there was nowhere to go but myself again, or at best a good book (note: not kindle, but one made of paper), the one I was reading being surprisingly relevant to my situation.

The cessation of choice was a enormously liberating. Life in London is utterly conducive to decision fatigue. Just choosing a coffee shop and which variant of drink can be hard enough. Let alone the myriad other choices from minor to major that we have to face every day. When you remove all of those choices and just have to eat or drink what’s available, or choose between walking or just staying where you are, life really becomes a simple pleasure.

Silence really is great, over the last few years I’ve come to dislike voluntary background noise. Those homes where the telly is constantly on, just ‘because’, even if the only person in the room is reading. Or the places that always have a radio blaring out as if they’re scared of the lonely, thoughtful abyss that silence and it’s questions might present them with, so keep some background noise going to try and block it out.

I relish that silence, it is only then that I am able to even begin to approach the boundaries of my own self, my own mind. If some idiotic local DJ is blathering on about spilt milk on the A394 and some other utterly trivial piece of aural spam then I begin to feel like crying.

I came back with clarity, just those four days gave me an amazing amount of psychological space, so six weeks would be, well, fantastic. And I’m in a peculiar position where I could do that at the moment.

You may well have just planted an irreversible seed.