What is your purpose?

Days are moving by fast and the day that you will set foot on the PCT is coming up with the rapid speed of the wind. The day that you have been preparing towards, imagining yourself under the heat of the desert sun tapping the Southern Terminus marker and embracing the adventure of the unknown, because what is yet to come? In this first blog for the Trek I would like to touch a little bit upon the purpose of my thru-hike and what inspired me to take on this adventure.

Planting the seed

During my final year of college in Wageningen (the Netherlands) I was struck with the thought of what was to come next in my life. All my life I have been following the common path; going to elementary school, high school, followed by university. After university life was suddenly all open and I had to opportunity to choose what path to take on in life now.

However, I didn’t feel like I was ready yet for a full-time job related to my masters in health and society and wanted to get work experience different from what I was used to. Getting more practical experience instead of the theoretical method that I had always followed sounded interesting to me. I started working for a freeflex platform and learned a wide variety of practical skills. I did many different things ranging from barista to working for fancy dinners, and designing makeup shelves to working in a crematorium.

With this work I really got outside of my usual bubble that I was in consisting of university and running friends. I met people with very different backgrounds and life paths than my own and learned a lot from them in all the different jobs I was doing.

However, in me something was still lingering and I wanted to do something else than what I usually would be doing. With my background as a student at the University of Portland on the west coast of the US, I knew about the PCT and the idea of hiking it was born!

Giving back to nature

I started decluttering my life, getting rid of most of my possessions with the idea that I would be able to totally let go of everything when I would start the PCT. This freed up a lot of mental head space for me and I started to think about my life and my PCT hike a little more.

I started contemplating about the meaning of my hike but also of the purpose of it. I figured that I wanted my hike to be more meaningful and have a bigger purpose and that I wanted to do something for one of the places that I cherish most, nature.

I connected my hike to a Dutch charity named TreesforAll that I will be fundraising for in order to make my hike contribute to the nature that I will be walking through. With my hike I want to raise awareness for our forests that are suffering as a result of global warming. The forest fires along the PCT are real life and close prove of this.

Connecting to nature

Next to wanting to contribute to nature, I also want to deeply experience and connect to it. What would it be like to completely emerge in nature for 5 entire months and in a way experience voluntary homelessness? What will it be like to let go of everything you always had and experience who you are without anything?

This is only the starting point yet of this journey and the unknown that I will be facing. But for now I am enjoying the process of letting go and embrace what is yet to come..

Photo Courtesy: https://www.instagram.com/r.aghav.sharma/