The Seeker

August 27^th, 2019

4:19 P.M. Hastings, NE United States

From my time in Cambodia to my time leaving for Uruguay, I will have been in the United States for exactly 1 month. During that time, I’ve done speaking engagements, weekly reports, doing odd tasks here and there, as well as several attempts at packing to keep busy. But for the most part, I’ve been unsure about what to do with my free time. It’s more than I usually have, and it's something that definitely leaves me feeling bored. So along with finishing How to Get Away with Murder on Netflix (which I HIGHLY recommend), I’ve been reading a lot of books, one of which caught the attention of my scatterbrained mind. Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, was published in 2012 and was quite popular after its release. However, due to my previously busy schedule, I am just now understanding why it was so successful. 

If unfamiliar with her story, in 1995 and at the age of 22, Cheryl found herself an absolute wreck after the death of her mother, her own failed marriage, and a family that was crumbling around her. Without experience or training, she decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, which spans over 1,100 miles along the West coast of the United States. She decided to do this by herself over the course of a few months as a way to "get her life back” and heal.

Without spoiling what she had to face, I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, this is absolutely crazy! How did she survive that?” And then a few moments later, “This sounds like something I would do.” And I think I would. Or I would like to think that someday, with hopefully a little more training and experience, I could do something as wild (pardon the pun) as this.

Hopefully I can avoid the stream of unfortunate events that Cheryl had to experience in order to get her to this point, but I understand her desire to just go. It’s how I feel right now. It’s how I’ve felt before now. I’ve been talking with other GMFs preparing to leave, and all of them, while they are excited, they also express how nervous they are; they are sad and frightened to leave what’s behind them.

Maybe it makes me strange, but I don’t feel that.

I’ve got nothing but excitement. Maybe that will change when I board the plane in two days, but I’m simply not nervous. I know I’m going to struggle, especially with the language, but I can’t wait for that. Of course, there are several things for which I feel unprepared: money, packing, saying goodbye to people, and the daunting feeling that I’m always forgetting something. But even if I were given more time before my departure, I would still feel unprepared, so I’m not worried about that. More time isn’t going to prepare me; it’s just going to make me wait for something I’m so unbelievably ready to do right now.

As I was reading this book and finding similarities between our lives, I came across a conversation Cheryl remembers having with her mother a few weeks after she began her long hike:

“I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even precisely what the word faith meant, in all of its complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake. ‘You’re a seeker,’ my mother had said to me when she was in her last week, lying in the bed in the hospital, ‘like me’” (134).

I think I’m a seeker, too. I’m not sure what I’m going to find, but I can’t wait to figure it out.