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He has achieved one of the hardest things to achieve in our time: a freedom from judgment about how and who he should be.
The idea that life is full of information. “You must train yourself to see what you are looking for.”
He is relaxed. There is no concern that he will miss it. He is not even concerned with finding it. He is completely open to the landscape around him.
The “me” shifted into something much larger than myself. I was completely engaged and forgot about time and all of my own little neuroses. As I disappeared, I felt the flow of the animals and the trees, the birds and the silent presence of the clouds. In this unity everything became innately meaningful. Even my own presence in that moment was free from the past and the future. It was more than enough for me to simply be in the experience. I realized the whole purpose of my life was manifest not as some distant outcome but here, inside an infinite state of enoughness.
He knows to think but also to feel. He uses the way his body feels moving on the track to feel the lion. As I watch Renias now I am struck by how disconnected we are from the body. Obsessed with thinking, modern culture has forgotten the innate knowledge of the body. How its signals are a guide, how it knows what it needs to be healthy. How it can tell you if something is right for you or not by the way it feels. We must learn to read the subtle tracks of the body, the way it relaxes and opens when something feels right, the contraction and tightness when we are not where we are meant to be.
“Hi ta swi kuma. We will get,” says Renias. He is supremely confident. Rather than criticizing and tearing down, the voice inside him motivates and builds. It is what in the world of coaching we call supportive self-talk. “I don’t know where we are going but I know exactly how to get there,” he says.
The wild self knows what you were meant to do. The wild self is whispering.
Accept that losing the track is part of tracking. Go back to the last clear track. There is information there. Walk up ahead checking any open terrain and bare ground. Open your focus. Any place you don’t find a track is not wasted, but part of refining where to look. Flow for a while on your best guess, alert, listening, noticing.
Trackers try things. The tracker on a lost track enters a process of rediscovery that is fluid. He relies on a process of elimination, inquiry, confirmation; a process of discovery and feedback. He enters a ritual of focused attention. As paradoxical as it sounds, going down a path and not finding a track is part of finding the track. Alex and Renias call this “the path of not here.” No action is considered a waste, and the key is to keep moving, readjusting, welcoming feedback. The path of not here is part of the path of here.
Suddenly, I feel an old friend who has walked with me for years arise. Each one of us has these friends; mine is called self-doubt. I have learned rather than to resist him, to invite him in, welcoming him as a teacher of humility. Together, we continue. The first track, and then the next first track. I am rusty and my eye is out of practice. Even after tracking all day, the pressure of being the lead jams me up. I feel myself go out of my body and into my head. Everything becomes a question. Is that a track? Is that? No, they wouldn’t walk there. Did they go the other way? “Yima, yima, buti.
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I hear the poet Rumi: “What you seek is seeking you.”
