Once a year I lose myself in the Western Isles to walk and think – before going back to the life I love

The Black Cuillins are covered in cloud in the winter. Sgrr nan Gillean, the peak that heralds the start of the dark serrated ridge that coils around the most mysterious of all Scotland's Lochs, means "cauldron of the waters"

You can find all seasons in a single day on the Isle of Skye. It is here that I like to forget myself and who I am.

My parents say that I was born in the Western Isles. I was born 11 months after their wedding. It was my first time here. I would sit in my high chair in the back of the old Austin Cambridge and sleep in the frost on the windows when we were awake. We would drive through the pass of Glen Coe and then follow the road to the Isles in search of waterfalls and remote glens. The grey clouds would be underlit by gold and pink and pale vermilion at the end of the day.

I find this sudden solitude shocking and precipitous

We lived in cottages and houses after my siblings were born. At the age of 21, I began to walk in the day and play cards in the dark. I go with my friends in autumn and at Christmas with my parents and any of my siblings who can make the trip. To write, to think, to be is what I do once a year.

I don't want to think or be as I am now. Not to think that you are busy. Not distracted or caught up. Not as a husband, a father, or a son. I want to be in a different way. It's in a deeper way. It could be meditatively. But isn't it? It's more like thinking and being in the way of becoming another human being again, and all the other things that comprise.

I stay in the same cottage many times. I have never been able to fall asleep. I drink too much tea and brew too much coffee. The place is remote and I can't see anything except the mountains and the occasional bird of prey that I wish I could tell the difference between. I don't like going to the shops so I cook my own food. A lot of writers prefer being alone. I am not a part of that group. Kinship and friendship have always been the best parts of living in London, I come from a large family and have lived there all my life. This sudden solitude is always shocking. I missed everyone and everything for two nights in a row. Behind the loneliness, I can feel my appreciation for the people I love. This re-realising of the great worth of the people in my company is something I enjoy.

My sister lost her baby daughter, my niece, my neighbour lost her daughter, one of my friends killed themselves, another was in a Covid coma for months, and I lost my cousins in a car accident. Human history seems to be affected by tragedy on a daily basis. It isn't healing that the Western Isles offer. It's possible that it's this renewed awareness and perspective.

I think about nature in the afternoons when I walk. There is an urge to destroy and contempt. The urge to be compassionate. Which nature will prevail 300,000 years from now? I think about the indifferent Earth and the magnanimous Earth, the place of volcanoes and earthquakes, and the place of fruit trees and clean air. I think about the blue ball spinning in space as I think about how incredible the Earth is. When I say I have forgotten myself, I mean all these thoughts.

I remember myself as well. The son of an officer in the British army was born in the barracks. His mother was taken to the Edinburgh insane asylum 17 miles away. The place is frightening to the modern eye and has a resemblance to a German asylum. Patients were kept here against their will. There were treatments that were done. People talk about their mental health and I think about Jesse. This is where questions of identity begin to arise.

Walking in the Isles offers me a feeling of renewed awareness

My great- grandfather had affairs. At that time in the Soviet Union, a ballet dancer from Georgia was having an affair with a man. My mother thinks this woman is her birth mother. My grandmother was born in India and met my grandfather during the war. They got married after she changed her name to Begum. This is only my mom's side of the story. I need to return to Europe for my father's side.

I didn't know how the Western Isles worked on me. Their secret is easy to understand. The landscape is moving fast. There is a world that is yet to come and a world that is ancient. I don't think that being here has altered anything. My capacity to acknowledge to encompass seems to have been expanded. My perspective is temporarily stretched to millions of years if I enter the time machine. Even though it snaps back and contracts, it doesn't shrink as much as it used to.

Many of the isles of the Inner Hebrides can be seen from the Black Cuillin ridge. My point of view expands again. At the end of the ridge is where the jagged peaks Sgrr nan Gillean and Am Basteir are located. I sat. I write down things I see. In the children's book I am co-writing, the two protagonists must climb a mountain through a snowstorm to escape the pursuer until they can break free from the storm on the ridge. These notes make me feel like I'm in the world below.

I am ready to come back to my life with my family, friends, and my children.

Edward Docx is the author of Swift and Hawk: Cyberspies. It can be purchased from guardianbookshop.com for just over seven dollars.