Are you going the wrong way?
Turn around!
“I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.” Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.
What direction are you going in?
Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild is about her 1100 mile hike on her own from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State.
She faced rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, as well as the incredible beauty and intense loneliness of hiking a trail on her own.
She had no experience of long-distance hiking or backpacking and her trek was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise”. The promise was “the piecing back together a life that had unravelled.”
Four years earlier Strayed thought she had lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage soon crumbled and slowly her life spun out of control. Feeling she had nothing to lose, she set out alone along the Pacific Crest Trail.
Half way through her journey she faltered and had to make a decision “to go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.”
In my experience, many of us have that moment in our lives.
It’s the moment when we want to turn back, where we feel we can’t keep going on the path we’re on because it feels too hard. (Even the Hobbits felt like this - watch Sam’s speech for inspiration.)
How can you go forward in the direction you intend to go this week?
Tomorrow night I’m hosting my first group coaching call for The Heart Leap Club for paid subscribers where we will be identifying our direction of travel.
Do join me.
You can join The Heart Leap Club here by becoming a paid subscriber.
P.S I was very happy to interview Cheryl Strayed live for The School of Life live on stage when her book Wild came out - she is honest, inspirational and wise.