Challenge accepted, a first step to hiking the Appalachian Trail

The summer before my 40th birthday I decided to attempt a 105-mile hiking trip on the Appalachian Trail. The Appalachian Trail is 2,190 miles long. With an average of 2,000 steps/mile, that’s approximately 4.4 million steps. A little daunting and overwhelming to say the least. 

I often feel the same way about the rest of this wide, wonderful, crazy world we live in. There are a lot of struggles and issues being experienced by all living things, human and non-human alike. When I scroll through the never-ending newsreel of catastrophes, I find myself vacillating between a fiery passion to right the wrongs, and an overwhelming sense of dread, of feeling very small and powerless to fix anything, much less everything. This feeling descends on me, reinforced by the snake oil salesmen peddling their wares, telling me that I’m not enough.

That feeling of “not enough” has eaten around the core of my being for much of my life. I count myself as a recovering perfectionist, and I have an inner critic who loves to spend time poking into my flaws and whispering to me about them. To appease her, I spent way too many years of my life focused on fixing things, trying to make things look flawless and fit in.

I credit the Appalachian Trail with changing the course of my life. In the months before setting out, I carefully prepared. I bought shiny new gear. I mapped out the exact number of miles that my friend Audrey and I would be walking each day. I wrote down when and where and what we would be eating for every meal. When I took that first step into Shenandoah National Park, I thought I was fully in control.

And the Trail chucked all of that careful preparation over the cliff. Over the course of 10 days and 105 miles, I learned that I had packed WAY TOO MUCH food and too few ibuprofen. I learned that hanging a food bag at night in the pouring rain is an almost impossible task if you don’t have the right rope, and that outhouses (known on the Trail as privies) are not necessarily the best places to store food away from bears. After a week on the trail, my shiny gear was covered with mud (along with the rest of me), and all illusions of control had been shattered.

Building connection and community

What I discovered underneath those illusions were some raw and beautiful glimpses into my true self. I discovered that I had the capacity to weather challenges, and that my knack for fixing things served me better in the moment, rather than in obsessing on some long-term mirage. I also rediscovered connection and community – as Audrey and I shared our struggles with other hikers on the Trail, they in turn shared theirs. We took care of each other with bits of advice, lots of Oreo cookies, compassion, and hilarious stories of triumphs and mishaps. Through this community, I learned that I am enough.

In one of her recent newsletters, the author and philanthropist Lynne Twist asked:

“The future does not exist now – we are creating it as we live. Can you hold the vision of the world you want to see? Can you speak of it with others and call them forth into seeing possibilities rather than descending into despair?”

I know that I do not hold all the answers. I have dropped the illusion of control and continue to release my urge to fix all the problems around me. And yet, I can still hold a vision. The Appalachian Trail has taught me to trust my goal. Even when I can’t see all the steps along the way, I can take a step, and then another.

This blog is my way of taking small steps to explore and share the possibilities – both within myself and in the circles of my life – of a future in which we recognize that we are a part of nature, in which we balance consumption with stewardship and contribution, in which we recognize and give thanks for being enough.