Where the wild things are

As the days lengthen here in Scotland, it’s time to escape again into the wilds of the Highlands and to the cairns that guide and mark the mountains. Among the many meanings of that wonderful word wild, I love the nuances that talk to being unconstrained, wilful, and independent. The sense of living according to one’s own laws and principles. Not being tied up by what others think or expect. The sense of being free.

The ever-brilliant Robert Macfarlane has a book The Wild Places in which he explores the concept along nature-themed lines… 

Wildness…is an expression of independence from human direction, and wild land can be said to be self-willed land.

For me, this evocation of self-determination correlates with marking a way forward for ourselves. It talks to setting out a way that talks to our own authentic selves, unfettered by the voices of expectations in our head – be they societal, religious, familial, or otherwise.

It talks to setting our own unique agenda out front, while still cognizant that any true purpose will always be greater than ourselves. Let’s underline this – to resonate as a driving vision, our way forward will always be some form of contribution for the benefit of the wider world. We’re not arguing sociopathic behaviour here.

Self-willed purpose is as it says on the tin. Our own way forward, freely determined, freely chosen. It comes from a position of absolute clarity of where we are and where we wish to go. We shed the chrysalid skin that has brought us here to emerge with our new self.

For many of us, this will come with a sense of relief, a sense of a weight being lifted off our shoulders as we step out of life-long roles to embark on the unknown. When we step into the wild to be where the other wild things are.

And sure, being true to ourselves and our chosen way forward is not easy. It’s not a life of neat garden fences and manicured lawns. The wild can be scary. Surviving and thriving will use all our resources and skills. There will be challenges and knockbacks, ledges that seem too high to reach. Yet that’s when we will feel most alive. When there’s that tingling in our fingers, when there’s that electricity in the air.

Another great nature writer, the late Roger Deakin describes in Waterlog how he broke free from the frustration of a lifetime endlessly doing lengths in pools to open-water swim across Britain, and how this crossing of boundaries into the wild allowed him to feel “complete and intense”.

Doing what is true to us is living in the REALM of the wild. And the best thing about being where the wild things are is, of course, all the rumpus.

Julian

I help people lead their own way forward