I discovered the joy of hiking in my 30s

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The most surprising part of getting older has been meeting each new version of myself as it emerges. I’d set myself so many rules that I believed I would live by forever. They served as both a dictionary and a set of blinders, governing how I described myself, what I cast my eyes toward and what I blocked out, unconsidered.

Over the past seven years, as I aged through and out of my 20s, I have rewritten and rearranged nearly all of them. Without even noticing, I’d set myself new guideposts. I’d redefined my rules of engagement. I’d become someone I had to get to know.

There could be no other explanation as to why I found myself strolling for three days across the lush green fells of England’s Lake District, finding joy in the face of each bedraggled mountain sheep – and their fresh, bleating lambs – that ran free across its ridges and roads.

Growing up, I never spent a night in a tent or a vacation in the woods. Chasing the freedom of the outdoors was not part of my suburban family’s ethos. I was taught to prefer holidays with the built-in promise of consistent access to a real bathroom.

The mere thought of eating the kind of bagged, dehydrated dinners that hikers and climbers favour was enough to make me dismiss the idea of camping throughout my 20s entirely. Nothing sounded less appealing than rock-solid chicken chunks, vacuum-packed and waiting for a drop of water to become edible.

Yet there I was, 32 and hunched over two vice-gripped hiking poles, clinging onto the crumbling side of a green-tipped fell, halfway through a 615-metre climb to Black Sail Pass. A 20-pound backpack weighing on my spine, I stared at the crumbling stone ridges that rose vertically before me into the threatening grey clouds above.

Six months earlier, I’d moved to London with my partner Matt. The city heaves with the weight and energy of millions upon millions of people, all flowing and fighting against each other, racing toward their own unknowns. Being faced with so many other existences forced me to start questioning the limits I’d set on my own.

I only realized the change had happened when I found myself agreeing to everything my old self would have reflexively shut down: Weekend camping trips, ultramarathons and an eight-day trek across Tour du Mont Blanc. This Lake District hike was the first of these bills to come due.

The wind picked up the higher we climbed until we crested the pass against the strongest gusts I’ve ever felt. Matt and I became cartoon characters bent sharply against the gale, fighting to land each step without being tossed off the narrow trail.

Matt turned to check on me with his hands cupped around his eyes as if to fight off the (non-existent) glare of the (very absent) sun.

“Go in front of me,” he yelled. “I can’t look back without the wind taking my glasses!”

I felt out of my body as I moved ahead. The situation was, objectively, nerve-wracking. The gales continued to lash against us as if they could pick us up at any moment. Rain hit us in random bursts, as if it wanted to keep us guessing.

It was the type of blood-pumping wildness that many people chased. But all I felt was a disconnected sense of calm.

What else was there to do, really, but laugh? At the way the gusts lashed the snot out of my nose, threatened to rip the contacts out of my eyes and attempted to push us backward with each struggle of a step we took. At the fact that I’d found myself atop this wind-whipped mountain, in the middle of a multiday hiking and camping trip that my 20-year-old self couldn’t have been paid to try.

Earlier that morning, we’d hugged the shore of the Buttermere lake on our way to the start of the climb. As we moved down the trail, the syncopated beat of each step and catch of our hiking poles on the pathway had become meditative, and I’d hit what Matt said was “hiker nirvana”: a level of disconnected peace that hikers drop into, lulled by the softness of nature and, perhaps, the endless aching of their feet.

Turning to him, I’d said that it seems we are all just looking for ways to entertain and define ourselves until we die. We seek it in each new hobby, bucket list tick, dinner reservation and after-work activity, picked up and discarded. As surprised as I was to have found myself on this camping trip, it was no exception. I had gotten bored of the box that I’d built around myself, and found a shocking willingness to trek across mountains outside of its walls.

We are put together by our parents and then we spend our adulthood rearranging ourselves accordingly – picking up each piece, even subconsciously, and deciding whether to chuck it out or braid it deeper into our sense of self.

I wasn’t raised to be an adventurer, but with each step up the Black Sail Pass, I was choosing to be one. I was walking off my old self, and stepping into something new.

Perry Rae Newsome is from Toronto, and lives in London.