Rather than being the clarifying experience I hoped it would be, in many ways my 9 months in northwest Alaska left me feeling more lost than ever. Books like Into the Wild and even Blue Highways, which I just started reading, aggrandize the enlightening qualities of such solo pilgrimages into the unknown, but in all reality it takes more than just having the experience to learn its lessons. It’s a cumulative process, a continually growing path built from the bricks of reflection, perspective, challenge, and constant questioning.
This isn’t to say I didn’t learn any lessons from my experience, but instead that the lessons I learned were not the ones I thought I was learning. Perhaps photography critic Nancy Newhall summed it up best when she wrote, “The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.”
Throughout my time in Alaska, I gained a renewed appreciation for my friends and family. It was a period of transition, leaving college, moving far from home, living on my own — a time of feeling more alone than ever and simultaneously realizing that I am anything but alone. The love and support I received from my friends and family throughout my journey absolutely blew my away. It made me want to give back in some way, to show my appreciation, to spend more time with the ones I care about.
I ended up becoming closer to people I never would have expected to reach out to me. I learned new meanings of the word “love.” I learned new things about myself that I would not have expected to find out there. And with all these new discoveries came more questions — questions that perhaps, like Newhall wrote, I have not yet learned to ask, and so I am left feeling lost.
I thought when I came home from Alaska last month, that was the end of that dream. A dream that had possessed my ambitions for years, set my course of navigation, and pointed my compass ever North. I had come to terms with leaving that cold, desolate land in which I had lived for all those months, happy with what I had accomplished, yet knowing there is a lot more I want to do with my life and more places I want to go.
But still when I left, I couldn’t help but feel that this was not quite the end. On paper, I had fulfilled my dream of living in Alaska: I checked it off my bucket list, been there, done that, got the t-shirt. But life isn’t a paper checklist, nor does it turn out that this is the end of my dream. Perhaps it was when I read the quote from Blue Highways, above, that I realized the proverbial “accomplish your dreams” advice may be more confining than I thought.
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