call of the wild

EXCERPT FROM ‘THIS ONE WILD AND PRECIOUS LIFE’ BY SARAH WILSON, PUBLISHED BY MACMILLAN AUSTRALIA.

“Wanderer, there is no path. The path is made by walking it.”
— Antonio Machado

I remember many years ago a friend sat with me on my couch and we were trawling through the tangled detritus of my recent failed relationship with some on-again-off-again bloke. The to-ing and fro-ing of the messy grief and blame had argued itself to a standstill, and my friend put down her wine and turned to me. “And… what are we going to do about it?” she asked.

Her implicit message was brutally and helpfully clear. Be in pain, do the pain. And… move forward. She’d recently done The Landmark Forum. She was all over brutal confrontation.

We can always add an ‘and…?’ to a shit sandwich. We can be in grief, we can itch, we can be overwhelmed, and we can choose to do something about it. We don’t have to be rendered numb, asleep, despairing. I learned some time back that I could be fretting with anxiety and I could choose to live a great life. It was a revelation when I opened myself to this truth. I didn’t have to wait for a ‘fix’ before I got on with living fully.

And… what are we going to do about it? It’s the big, beautiful question for our times.

By this juncture I’d nutted out the nub of our human despair crisis – we’re morally lonely, trapped in our human smallness and an empty more-more-more cult. I’d got real about the scale and urgency of the elephant in the room. As I say, there was no unseeing any of it, no going back.

And this is where I got horribly stuck. I