Master Your Internal World and the External Will Follow

What we call “important” is subjective. A person needs a set of priorities before anything can be deemed important. My experience on the Pacific Northwest Trail gave me a new set of priorities. Safety and stability were still important but now they were superseded by excitement, novelty, growth, and above all else, adventure. During a thru-hike the first things to go are unnecessary material goods. If I didn’t use it every day it wasn’t that important. After that, I realized that I was carrying around a lot of unnecessary mental baggage, too. I began to examine the contents of my mind, deciding which thoughts were important and which ones weren’t. The practice of self-examination became the most important thing I learned on the hike. It wasn’t a harsh, self-conscious way of thinking, but it wasn’t naive acceptance of personality flaws either. I learned to look at myself honestly and objectively. I learned to appreciate the good parts and I figured out what it would take to fix the bad parts.  

The wilderness is constantly presenting positive and negative situations. At first I was a slave to those fluctuations. A positive situation, like an amazing view, had me in a great mood. Then a negative situation, such as bad weather, made me pessimistic. I spent a lot of time wishing things would get better. It took a long time and a lot of suffering before I realized how pointless that was. No one can wish the rain into actually stopping.

After I had hiked in enough heavy downpours, the light rain that used to bother me was actually pleasant. Before, it wasn’t the discomfort that made me miserable, it was my belief that things were bad. Now my definition of “bad” had changed, it required something more extreme. Light rain wasn’t bad at all, because I had experienced so much worse.