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Where the curiosity never ends…

Wild - 28.07.20.
“I’m a free spirit who never had the balls to be free.”
If I were to go through Wild by Cheryl Strayed and highlight all that resonates with me at this moment, I should turn the pages yellow. From the first time I read it over four years ago, I felt a flicker of recognition in her words. A small flame was lit, and I knew I wanted something more.
I was envious of Cheryl. She had been through so much and had felt such unbelievable pain and yet found the strength to go off into the wild and to find out who she really was. I had felt broken for a long time, a collection of fragmented pieces. The thought of disappearing off into the wilderness and walking myself back together as she had done seemed both terrifying and idyllic.
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At first, I believed it was just about climbing a mountain, which I duly did one year later. A major achievement in itself. Relatively unfit, with only a single year of hard won sobriety under my belt, I somehow reached the summit of Ben Nevis. The cloud was thick, obscuring the view, but I still knew I was starting to get somewhere, I just didn’t know where that somewhere was yet.
I can’t blame Cheryl entirely for my desire to return to the wild, for I first heard those whispers in my ear long before she came along. Quiet at first, they were easy to ignore, explain away as those doubts, we all have from time to time. But as is often the case with these things, these voices don’t tend to go away quietly, they exploit every opportunity they can to speak louder and ring in your ears when all you want is silence. And sometimes those voices scare me, they say things I never
expected them to say, things I wish were not true and things I don’t want to hear. But what scares me more is not listening to them, for I know deep down they speak the truth.
“There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.”
So, what did Wild really teach me and why do I think of it once more? It taught me that isn’t about taking a walk for a while or climbing a single mountain. It is about choosing to carry on walking even though it scares you. Climbing more mountains, when you don’t think you can.
I know there will be times where I will look back at whence I came, yearning for the comfort it once gave, but I know that I shall carry on, for my heart tells me, you are no longer going that way.
“And so I walked on.”
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