The wilderness inspired my travel lifestyle – but I learned the wrong lessons about freedom | Culture

Met’s 5.30am, and I wake up on a granite rock overlooking the Domeland Wilderness, nothing but forest, rock and silence for miles. I have 44 days to hike the Pacific Crest Trail – a journey of about 2,650 kilometers from the border of Mexico to Canada through desert, pine forests, deep valleys, volcanoes and alpine mountains. Every day I walk about 20 kilometers with everything I need for the next four months on my back.

I was 16 years old when I first saw Into the Wild, the film tells the true story of Christopher McCandless, a runner who left his middle life to live in the desert. I’m always curious and I was drawn to the idea of ​​abandoning expectations and traveling the world on my own terms. I began to think about escaping my bubble in north London to be far away and unknown like the American wilderness in the film.

Over the next 20 years, that itch took me everywhere: three months in India, four months in Nepal, five months in Brazil. Between work and studies, whenever I felt anxious, I would go on a trip to another country, hoping that it would help me understand who I am and what I wanted in life. Those trips made me, but I was always chasing the next place, the next view and the next experience, complaining that I was missing something and believing that freedom was out of reach.

This changed over time, and I began to see the Wild differently. When I was 16 years old, I was fascinated by how Christopher rejected the life he thought was important. But when I grew up, I stopped admiring the way he stopped interacting with people and I started to see the need to do this. I began to understand what the older people in the film warned him about: that freedom means little if it comes at the cost of the people you leave behind.

Then one evening, in my late twenties, when I was living in Los Angeles, I was walking home one night when I realized how lonely I was in a city of millions. I missed my family and friends, so I returned to London and put down roots, nurturing relationships instead of looking for another escape.

This year, when I started hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in April, a trip I had been thinking about for almost two decades, it wasn’t because I wanted to escape my life. It was because I wanted to move on to something else: to have a deeper connection with nature and to trust myself. Hiking has become my meditation, a way to relieve my anxiety when my mind is running high. I find myself constantly stopped by the great beauty around me: cactus flowers, desert dunes, amazing sunsets.

The biggest thing it has taught me is to take life in stride. It sounds simple, and is often said, but it has meant a lot to me. I feel so grateful – not just for the amazing place, but to live one day at a time. There is peace in not having to think everything through, and instead trusting in the next step, which is the next step after that.

I’m alone on the mountainside, I’m not lonely. I have learned that loneliness and isolation are not the same thing. If anything, I take comfort in my isolation, especially knowing that I have roots back home. I realize now that the freedom I wanted all those years ago was mental freedom, not physical escape. And this, I realized, can be found anywhere.