How to Trek

The cold water started to enter my boots and then it moved up.

It was moving slow enough that I could feel the goosebumps forming on my skin as the cold water began to wrap around my legs.

I could sense the flight-or-flight response system in my brain firing, asking ‘is this safe?’.

It was safe, so I thought.

The next thing I knew I was unexpectedly fully submerged under water. My reaction surprised me.

I had slipped. Sitting there with my butt on the hard rocks, I began to laugh.

The fall broke the tension I had been feeling in my mind.

The tension in my mind that had been growing since the moment I was handed boots, pants, a lifejacket and a helmet. That was back on land, as I was being instructed on how to dress.

All of the preparation, precaution and warnings had gotten me nervous. My mind got lost in wandering and wondering what might happen. And in doing so, I was no longer paying attention to what was happening and distracted with what might happen.

This moment was the beginning of a day-long river trekking activity in the North of Portugal last weekend, where I ‘hiked’ up a river.

The first challenge I had to overcome was my mind. Here was something I had never heard of and had done before. In response, my mind was flooded with worry, almost instinctively.

How many other moments am I faced with something new that I instinctively worry about just because it is new? I imagine it is a survival instinct, part of evolutionary biology and helps me stay alive.

However this attitude of responding with ‘I’m not sure because I don’t know about it’ limits my living. It constrains the opportunities and the experiences that I can access.

The more I say ‘yes’ to what I don’t know, the more I build the confidence to say ‘yes’ to what I don’t know. The reverse is also true. The more I say ‘no’ to what I don’t know, the more comfortable I’ll be to say ‘no’ to what I don’t know.

The second challenge I had to overcome was my body. Actually, the challenge with my body was yet again a challenge with my mind. In response to not having done this activity before and worrying that it was going to be physically challenging, my mind began to worry during the activity that my body couldn’t do it.

It was like if my mind was the parent and my body was the child, the parent was telling the child it couldn’t do something that the child could actually do and might even like. However if the child blindly listened to the parent, it would not even try.

My body loved the experience. It was challenging, in a good way. The endorphins running through me afterwards felt electric, I felt alive. I felt energized. I felt I wanted to do it again.

This is the difference between knowledge and experience.

My mind swims in the sea of knowledge. Both actual knowledge and fictitious knowledge. It will study what is and imagine what might be.

My body swims in the sea of experience. It only exists in this present moment, and engages with life through its senses and many parts.

The knowledge of my mind mixed with the experience of my body created this wisdom that I can do things I don’t know how to do or know much about. And it is this wisdom that shapes my choices on how I move through life.

And this is how I learned how to trek through life.