The Red Mist Reminder…. The Pennine Way, one year on…

Twenty Eighth September twenty twenty-four. The day I finished my month long sojourn on the Pennine Way. Twenty-nine days of motion and solitude. And wonder.

We are a species and a society that wants everything, and wants it now. That goes for both possessions and for change.

I came away from my journey expecting change to be instant, well, almost instant anyway. I knew that some of my perspectives had changed. I had made one promise to myself that I knew I could put in place immediately, and there were promises made by many other people.

I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to go back to working myself twenty four seven as I almost had been for the year or two previous to the challenge. The last two weeks of my experience had taught me patience if nothing else.

By Christmas that year I was working twenty four seven once again. In January my wife sat me down and simply made her point.

‘Did the Pennine Way teach you nothing? You are trying to hold down a job, run a CIC, and a business, write a book; you are a husband, father and a grandfather and to put it simply, you are doing them all crap!’

That was hard to hear, and quite probably had anyone except my wife have told me, I probably wouldn’t have heard them. It can be hard to listen when you are driven.

I put everything on hold, except the job. And decided to do so until I had worked out what was important to me.

Some of it was obvious, husband, father and grandfather is a given. Hold down the job, after all you have to pay the bills. Everything else needed serious consideration. I also stopped putting out daily posts on social media.

At first it was hard, as humans, we are driven to be busy, or distracted by whatever chemical is our drug of choice.

After a fortnight the answers were becoming clear. I was enjoying the space. I had become pretty good at keeping my mind slow, however, I needed to give my body the same space.

No social media was a relief.

I changed my affirmation from ‘I am a brand that makes enough money to allow me to help other people unhindered,’ whatever that means, to ‘do less, achieve more, leave room for magic and wonder to find me.’

And my God, so much magic and wonder has found me too.

What I really wanted to do was write my next book. I had begun work on what was given the running title of ‘my monster.’ A story of trauma, that began with my grandfather in the trenches of WW1 and ended sometime around now along with a story of peace found whilst walking the Pennine Way. A story that looked at the causes of my grandfather’s suicide in nineteen fifty-two and the trauma that I had been managing and never found a root cause for.

That Story is likely to be called ‘The clock and the woodcutter.’ It is this year’s work, the year is two thirds of the way through and so, roughly, is the narrative.

A phrase my old mentor said so often has become my conscious filter when faced with any opportunity or choice, ‘is this taking me closer to, or further away from my goal.’ Effectively, keeping me focussed, is this helping me write the book or not.

The unconscious mantra is ‘do the time, take the money, write the book.’

I’ve also realised that virtually all my anxiety has gone, that huge. I am clearing so much baggage out of my system, and I KNOW happiness is within and not in the hands of anything external, particularly those who cannot deliver what they promise.

Of course it’s not all roses, whilst at the ‘An evening of Hope’ event last Monday, the door man was threatening to not let me in because I hadn’t downloaded an app and made an account, thus have the relevant q code.

He made me see red. I lost my calm demeanour.

He may have made me see red. I did not have to let the red mist come down.

Simon Pollard September 2025.

P.S. I had a difficult meeting coming that I didn’t know about. Universe was just giving me a reminder as to how to manage these situations.