"The important thing, then, about running your tight little outdoor economy is that it must not run you. You must learn to deal with the practical details so efficiently that they become second nature...you leave yourself free to get on with the important things - watching cloud shadows race across a mountainside...or sitting on a peak and thinking of nothing at all except perhaps that it's a wonderful thing to sit on a peak and think of nothing at all.

"...Naturally, your opinions on equipment and technique must never fossilize into dogma: your mind must remain open to the possibilities of better gear and to new and easier ways of doing things. You try to strike a balance, of course - to operate efficiently and yet to remember, always, that the practical details are only a means to an end...

"...You'll discover as the years pass that walking becomes a beautiful, warm, round pumpkin that sits upon a shelf, always ready to be taken down...It wouldn't be the same round and personal pumpkin, of course, if you hadn't grown it yourself...And it's always sitting up there on the shelf - that big, beautiful pumpkin - just waiting for you to wave the wand and turn it into something much more magical than a carriage."

Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker, all four editions.

I couldn't have said it better myself.