‘In the Wild’ Inspired My Adventurous Life – But I Learned the Wrong Lessons About Freedom | culture

IIt’s 5.30am, and I’m waking up on a slab of granite overlooking the Doomland Wilderness, where there’s nothing but forest, stone and silence for miles. I spent 44 days hiking the Pacific Crest Trail—a nearly 2,650-mile trek from the Mexican border to Canada through desert lands, pine forests, deep canyons, volcanic terrain, and alpine mountains. Every day, I walk about 20 miles and carry on my back everything I need for the next four months.

I was 16 when I first saw Into the Wild, the film that tells the true story of Christopher McCandless, an adventurer who abandoned his middle-class life to live in the wilderness. I’ve always had a sense of adventure I was drawn to the idea of ​​breaking away from expectations and moving through the world on my own terms. I began to imagine escaping my North London bubble to live somewhere as remote and unknown as the wild American landscape in the film.

Over the next 20 years, that desire took me everywhere: three months in India, four months in Nepal, and five months in Brazil. Between jobs and studies, whenever I felt stuck, I would set off on an adventure, hoping it would help me understand who I was and what I wanted out of life. Those trips shaped me, but I was always chasing the next place, the next view and the next experience, worried that I was missing something, thinking that freedom was still just out of reach.

That has changed over time, and I’ve even begun to see Into the Wild differently. When I was sixteen, I was horrified by Christopher’s rejection of the life I felt was his destiny. But as I got older, I stopped admiring his abandonment of society and began to see the cost of it. I began to understand what the older characters in the film warned me about: that freedom doesn’t mean much if it comes at the expense of the people you leave behind.

One evening, in my late twenties, while living in Los Angeles, I was walking home one night when I realized how alone I felt in a city of millions. I missed my family and friends, so I returned to London and put down roots and strengthened relationships rather than looking for the next escape.

This year, when I finally set out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in April, an adventure I’d been envisioning for nearly two decades, it wasn’t because I wanted to escape my life. It was because I wanted to move towards something: to have a deeper connection with nature and to trust myself. Hiking has become a kind of walking meditation for me, and a way to deal with my anxiety when my thoughts get too loud. I always find myself stopping in awe of the sheer beauty around me: the cacti, the blue desert flowers, the stunning sunsets.

The biggest thing the road has taught me is to take life one step at a time. It sounds simple, and it’s often said, but it has come to mean something much bigger to me. I feel a huge sense of gratitude – not just for the extraordinary landscape, but for being able to experience life day in and day out. There is peace in not having to know everything, and instead trusting the next step, and then the next step after that.

Alone on the side of the mountain, I never feel lonely. I’ve learned that loneliness and isolation are not the same thing. Anyway, I’m relieved by the isolation, especially since I’m returning these roots to my home country. I now realize that the freedom I was searching for all those years ago was freedom of the mind, not a physical escape. And I’ve discovered that it can be found anywhere.