What getting outside gave us when life got difficult

I’m not going to pretend that a walk fixes everything.

It doesn’t.

There are things fresh air can’t solve.

Appointments still exist when you get home.

Grief still comes back through the door with you.

The hard stuff doesn’t disappear because you spent an hour near some trees.

But getting outside has given us something important over the last few years.

Space.

When life became smaller, being outside made it feel a little bigger again.

There were times when family life felt completely taken over by health problems, worry, school, appointments, symptoms and trying to work out what came next.

Everything started to feel very contained.

Very indoors.

Very focused on what wasn’t going right.

Going out broke that up.

Sometimes it was a proper walk.

Sometimes it was barely a walk at all.

A local trail.

A bit of woodland.

A reservoir.

A muddy path.

Terra pulling ahead because he’d clearly decided we were all moving too slowly.

Nothing impressive. We weren't climbing mountains or having inspirational moments at the top of hills. Sometimes it was just about being somewhere else for a while, and I think that mattered more than I realised at the time.

When you're dealing with long periods of stress, your world can start to shrink around the problem. You notice the symptoms, the appointments, what's changed and all the things you can't do.

Going outside gave us other things to notice instead. The weather changing. A dog being ridiculous. Someone slipping in mud. A decent view, or sometimes a pretty rubbish one. Just ordinary things that weren't medical, urgent or about trying to fix anybody.

I think that’s what I value most about being outdoors now.

It doesn’t ask anything from you.

You don’t have to be good at it.

You don’t need the right gear.

You don’t need to cover ten miles.

You don’t need to turn it into a challenge.

Sometimes you just need to get out of the house.

That’s enough.

It also changed the way I thought about clothing.

I didn’t want RippleNorth to be about outfits that only make sense in a styled photograph.

I wanted it to fit the actual things we do — dog walks, pub stops, family days, weekends away, rubbish weather and getting in the car just because we need a change of scene. Basically, clothes you can actually live in.

Getting outside hasn't solved any of the difficult stuff. We've still come home to the same problems, appointments and worries we left with. But we've also come home muddy, laughing about something stupid Terra did, or with a memory from that day that had absolutely nothing to do with illness or grief.

I think that's what getting outside gave us more than anything. For a little while, life got to be about something else.