Walk the Walk
Things have a tendency to escalate in my life…
When I bought a house in Chorley, I would regularly take walks along the nearby Leeds-Liverpool canal. I began to wonder what the rest of the canal looked like. This escalated to walking all 127 miles in six days, raising £2,000 for the FlyAnyway Foundation in the process.
When I later sat down to write a blog about the experience, I realised a blog or two just wouldn’t be enough. This escalated to writing my first book.
In the same way that the Leeds-Liverpool canal winds it’s way around the towns and cities of Yorkshire and Lancashire, Walk the Walk winds it’s way around my personal philosophies. ‘Felicity’ means ‘happiness’, and it is a subject which has long been a source of fascination. My Felisophy draws on yoga study, psychology and neuroscience, culminating in one phrase that I live my life by:
Live a satisfied life you don’t need to escape from.
As I journey across the North of England, I invite you to journey through my contemplations about the human experience; living life with less fear, embracing joys that materialism cannot fulfil, pushing ourselves to grow and improve. The expedition demonstrates the importance of strong communities and the value of friendship. The canal itself reveals how we can thrive when we adapt to difficulties, and how important change is for life to blossom.
My pilgrimage from east to west was not just a physical challenge, but also a mental and emotional one. There is pain. There are tears. There are serious notions of giving up and questions about what success really is anyway. While the walk itself has a finish line, there is no sense of conclusion in the same way that nothing in life really concludes. It is merely a step towards the next thing, the next journey.
Walk the Walk is foreworded by Dani Wallace, founder of The Big Festoon and the FlyAnyway Foundation. It includes memories from Lee Fuller and Claire Wright who assisted and accompanied me on walk. It also features the incredible stories of two beneficiaries of the FlyAnyway Foundation, Lejla Dauti and Emily Mawson. It is part travel diary, part philosophy journal, with an added dose of canal history.
Walk the Walk inspires a renewed commitment to live life deliberately, to bridge the gap between intention and action, and to find meaning in motion itself. This book is a call to the movement of body, mind and soul. It is an invitation for you to choose your own path, and to take your first steps as you walk your own walk.
Finding Felicity 