AWOL on the Appalachian Trail

by David Miller

When the path is clear to pursue a fledgling goal, the path is also clear for deeper insight into your desires.

When you attempt to capture the highlights without burdening yourself with the tedium, the highlights lose the foundation that elevates them to the status of “highlight.” Analogies abound because a focused attitude defines the quality of all that we do. In playing a game, dieting, or hiking the AT, you benefit most when you commit yourself to it, embrace it.

Experience is enriched by reliving it, contemplating it, and trying to describe it to another person.

Politicians will always offer to handle education, health care, retirement, and so forth, as if they come at no cost. But there are caveats. If the government is the provider of “free” education, then the government will also decide what is taught and, potentially, how it is used. The fewer responsibilities we have, the less free we are. Communism and democracy differ in this only by a matter of degree. We can vote away freedom as easily as it can be taken away.

This seems to be an attitude worth striving for when I return to work, to perform my job as if I was doing it under my own guidance—as I would want it done myself—not to limit myself to the role of employee, and not to refrain from giving more of myself to the job than is warranted by my pay. It is I who would benefit. Time is most enriching when spent industriously.

29 Lion King’s excellent documentary is available through www.walkingwithfreedom.com.

32 Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man (New York: Penguin Publishing, 2002).

Backpacking is hard—that’s just the way it is. Obviously conditioning is advantageous, but the perception of disadvantage can be more debilitating than actual disadvantage.

It is disturbing how tenuous our potential is due to our fervent defense of the comfortable norm.