Into The Wild

You are having a hard time, but face and conquer it all. The gravity of your environment again sucks you into a black hole of depression. You again swim your way out of the darkness. You sit down to catch your breathe back and realize 40 years have gone by. Time's demeanour is defeating you in your life's marathon. Life's key events play vividly, and yet with a fade, in your mind. You recap it all in a way similar to the teasers played in movie theaters. You worry more when you realize - It's not a movie, but your life. You have kids, family, a five-figure salary, a beautiful/handsome wife/husband, and furnished apartment in a plush locale.

On the surface, this is all you ever dreamed of. This is your idea of a perfect life. But there is an incumbent desire deep within your heart to discover yourself, to know life's realities, travel and be close to the nature, visit solace to enlighten your soul about your purpose in life. However, there are hurdles. Your life is now as predictable as the ups and downs experienced in old-fashioned amusement park rides. You go up and come down in a periodic manner, just like a sinusoidal wave. There are bills to be paid, school fees to attend to, and a cubicle-bound corporate world to live in.

If this setup seems to be a highly-probable prophecy of your life, then you can be categorized as a common man.



The story, Into The Wild, is a real-life account of an uncommon boy, on the verge of manhood, who lived his dream. Who believed that the core of mans' spirit comes from new experiences. And experience, he gained through nature, living by the land, and dying in his pursuit of solace and enlightenment. He hitchhiked across countries, paddled across the Grand Canyon into Mexico, worked in grain fields despite earning a college diploma and grades good enough to get into Harvard. He achieved what many self-proclaimed saints can't - that is, detachment from the green paper - Money.

Chris was an intense personality since childhood. If there was something that he liked, he would go and grab it. His love for nature was fueled during his family's road trips, treks, and the enviable love for nature practiced by his grandfather. Ever since he got his car, he started venturing on road trips during his time off from school.

He and his father, Walt McCandless, were equally intense. Consequently, they had a fair share of differences. However, the distance between them widened after Chris discovered that he was born in a celibate relationship. Chris said, in a letter to his sister, that the discovery has made him see his life as fiction. He held a high moral ground for himself and the world. So, avoided his parents as much as he could, especially during his road trips. He hardly sent them any postcards or letters regarding his whereabouts.

Since childhood, he had dreamed to travel to Alaska and after growing a bit older, he dreamed to live off the Alaskan land, to feel the nature, and to walk into the wild. After graduating, he set off on his final adventure to fulfill his Alaskan Odyssey. He set off to fulfill his dream, but never to return.

The movie Into the Wild is an inspirational account of Chris's journey into the wild.  It inspired me to read the book with the same title - Into The Wild - to get an insight into Chris's character and to get clearer answers to why  a top student and athlete at the Emory University abandon all his belongings and relations as if they never existed. How can a child brought up in an affluent family develop a kind of detachment from the material world that only sages can achieve? Or posses the detachment that we hear about on umpteen number of religious channels?

A person with such an enviable morale and sense of reality could not be just another road bum? If a person, who never followed what was instructed to him, tells you, "You are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience. People just need to change the way they look at things." Will you say that the person is a bum or a someone who thinks a lot about life and the general perception of the society towards the world. Well, my choice is the latter.

Many said that Chris was a psycho who died in the wilderness like many other bums and hippies who set into the Alaskan wilderness unprepared. However, Chris was different. He was unprepared, right, but it was mainly due to his unconscious over-confidence in his abilities. He was neither suicidal  like many other folks who ventured on similar odysseys. If you read the book, Into the Wild, you will better understand his love for the world, people, and life through accounts of people who met him during his journey.

He never returned from his odyssey and created vacuum in the lives of his beloved. That was his main and biggest mistake, but what we learn from his life and words are deep insights into our own lives. In one of the letters to a friend, he stated that we have problems and learn to live with them. We never try to do something different to find a solution.

If you look up at the zeal with which Chris set out to achieve his dream, you can learn a lot. We set our goals to achieve innumerable tasks in our material life, but never think about discovering ourselves, getting close to nature, or doing a bit to make the world a better place. Sustainable happiness will never live with you if it arises through booze and dinner parties after you complete a project, or if you win a quarterly performance award in your organization. These materialistic achievements, and the consequential happiness, are as temporary as your present breath. Before you enjoy it in the space of a day, it's over and you move onto the next biological inhale and exhale step. What lives with you are the good deeds you do, the kind of experiences you have, or the kind of people you meet. As long as you stay bottled up in a cubicle-bonded life, the probability of knowing people as they are is very less, the experiences will be repetitive, and your deeds will be great, only for your organization or team.

Chris had stated, "I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one." I agree with this. Human had lives before the term career became our only motivation in life. Everything we do is career driven. Due to our responsibilities, it may be not possible to forgo of our career. However, we can all take time out to do something we love and know thyself, know the world we live in, know the nature that has gifted us with our life.

If someone does us a favor, we either try to payback with help or a gift. Now, when nature and the world has given us - US, can't we give something back to the world? That's not a one-way material benefit like the corporate world, but it may lead to an experience, which can redefine your perception of life and give you lasting memoirs. Nature only gives and never asks for anything in return. Develop a morale to return something good to it.

Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild. - (Alexander Supertramp May 1992) Chris McCandless


Chris's story, Into the Wild, will surely make you think, in what sense, depends on you.

He walked into the wild, his soul lives on in the heart of wilderness. -- Lokesh