The Way of the Wolf: Swim the Lake and Climb the Tree
I listened to a podcast the other day where the legendary and late writer and poet Jim Harrison was being interviewed. During his time on the planet, he lived fully, drinking in all that life could offer as an outdoorsman, gourmand and, of course, author. Books he wrote like Legends of the Fall and Brown Dog are full of flawed characters embroiled in messy, sometimes tragic adventures. They are tales that will get your heart racing and have you yearning to break away from the everyday and strike out freely into the wild world. In the course of the conversation, Harrison rolled out a quote that grabbed my full attention—making me stop the audio and play it back, again and again.
In his growling, weathered voice, he said something along the lines of, “Life is essentially frightening. . . A great gift anyone can have is an insatiable curiosity, and that is what flings you on through life. Your life becomes a trajectory. But without curiosity, people can lose years in a pathetic situation because they’re not curious enough. . . A train is obligated to stay in a track, but a human being gets to turn left, swim across the lake and climb a tree to see what things look like. So we don’t have to be trains, to be in these ruts. . . a rut that becomes so deep the earth covers us over and we die like most of us do by dislocation or suffocation. Mental exhaustion.”
Everyone gets in a bit of a rut from time to time. We get locked into a cycle of career, family, bills, streaming services, smart phones, etc—a Groundhog Day existence exacerbated by the confining nature of the past couple of years. It can emotionally bury us—sometimes so deeply that we feel we can never extricate ourselves from the life we’ve created for ourselves.
Everything is a choice though, and that box we hem ourselves into sometimes is merely psychological. As Harrison says, we need to have ‘insatiable curiosity’ to stay out of that rut. For me, I have a curiosity to explore areas of the wild I haven’t been to before, to experience areas new to me and bring back the stories I find there. This is what passionately drives me to crawl out of my ditch of recurring habits before I’m buried beneath the dirt of comfort and routine.
Harrison’s words remind me that no matter how locked into a routine you may be, how scary change may seem, it’s always worthwhile stepping out of your comfort zone. Be it striking off by kayak, canoe, ski, bike or on foot—for a few hours or a few weeks—shaking off the routine will break the spell and re-energize you. So, this year, make the escape. Plan a grand adventure. Get off the track, swim across the lake and climb that tree. You won’t regret it.
