Man craves adventure (see more of this idea with Krakauer’s “Into the Wild”). I say “man” in both the male and female sense, perhaps mankind. Our sense of adventure has driven humanity to travel to the moon, strive to reach other planets, and journey to the deepest ocean depths. These journeys can also take us to areas of self-reflection and individual challenge. Cheryl Strayed’s account of her adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail highlights the drastic changes that some people need in their lives as well as our individual quest to understand ourselves and the world around us.

1. The exhaustion and the deprivation; the cold and the heat; the monotony and the pain; the thirst and the hunger; the glory and the ghosts that haunted me as I hiked eleven hundred miles from the Mojave Desert to the state of Washington by myself.
2. I prayed and prayed, and then I faltered. Not because I couldn’t find God, but because suddenly I absolutely did; God was there I realized, and God had no intention of making things happen or not, of saving my Mother’s life. God was not a granter of wishes. God was a ruthless bitch. (discover more faith in “Proof of Heaven”)
3. It took me years to take my place among the ten thousand things again. To be the woman my mother raised. To remember how she said honey, and picture her particular gaze. I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there.
4. One of the worst things about losing my mother at the age I did was how very much there was to regret. Small things that stung now. All the times I’d scorned her kindness by rolling my eyes or physically recoiled in response to her touch.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail