I recently finished Cheryl Strayed’s travel memoir, “Wild“, and I thoroughly recommend it. Just a very brief synopsis, it recounts her 3 month-long journey along the Pacific Crest Trail after the death of her mother.
I also saw the movie and both the book and movie made me realize that I kind of miss camping and hiking; two activities that I used to do quite a lot in my younger days.
These activities combine a couple of aspects of life that I enjoy. First is a feeling of freedom that is hard to match in any other setting or situation. Out in the wilderness you are no longer bound by the labels and situations that might define you in the “real” world. A person can leave behind the labels of office worker or family member or that person at the book club and become just an individual human being. You define yourself as who you want to be and as you are able to. Which leads me to the second aspect that I like.
In the wild you survive as you are able to. Without any supporting structures or artificial constructs. Whatever you need to live you either bring with you, make, or do without. Kind of harsh? Of course! But that’s why it’s called roughing it. Not only do you pit your physical strength, but your ingenuity, and your mental toughness against the environment to come out on top. It’s like an all body and all aspect workout. If you do it right you end up moderately comfortable, if not you end up uncomfortable and maybe miserable but you learn something about yourself along the way.
Which goes into another aspect about camping and hiking which is that it really does stress you and bring out hidden strengths and weaknesses out to the surface and you are forced to exploit those newly revealed strengths or have to deal with these hitherto unknown weaknesses. These newly found skills and strengths can be put to use immediately or saved up to take advantage of at a future date and the newly discovered weakness can be purged before they become a problem in your normal life.
Sitting in front of a fire late at night is a meditative experience. None of the distractions of life, the noise, the superfluous and banal thoughts of daily life are filtered out by the physical experience and get left behind. The more important, primal, and central thoughts of your existence take center stage.
Solitude has the effect of acting as a catalyst for original thinking. You are left with only your own mind and your own self to keep you company and you are forced to come up with new ideas and new thoughts to keep you occupied. You begin to realize what the important parts of your life really are.
The concept of physical privation and struggle to attain a higher state of either greater mental or spiritual strength is not new nor unique to any particular culture or time and place. Many cultures in the past have had something similar either for young individuals to experience as an inauguration into adulthood or for the philosopher or shaman to act as a revelatory episode and step into the next world.
In the post modern and more urban world that we inhabit however this becomes harder if not impossible for an individual to experience anymore. Not only are the locations for such experiences becoming harder to access but the tradition and structures that encouraged and guided such meditations are really becoming rarer and harder to find. Being alone and contemplative is passively if not actively discouraged in our society.
We just don’t seem to have time for this anymore. Which is a shame really. For such experiences are necessary at least for some individuals to realize new truths and to think new thoughts.
Is it for everyone? No. Some people are just not cut out for this type of journey. Maybe they’re not up to it physically or maybe they would find it mentally daunting. But I think for some people it is something necessary to experience from time to time to give their lives some clarity and focus. A literal and figurative path for their lives to follow.
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