If I am alone. I am alone in the wild, like that young man in Alaska who died of starvation totally alone, without the comfort of his sister, the opportunity to forgive his parents, the ability to see the people he connected with again, if I am alone.
I have been alone. There's something very sobering about being alone in the wild. The world around me envelopes me with beauty that I have for myself and can't share with anyone. That's a dilemma I understand the young man had faced. When we are in society, with other people, we are prone to hurt others and be hurt. We can treat one another with utter, unspeakable brutality, and yet if we are alone, we have no one to share our emotions, no one to listen to, no one to be listened to.
Everyday when I am with people, living among them even if I am not interacting with them, the relationships that I build can weigh on me. I end up caring about the most unimportant matters and dream of unshackling myself from the fetters that are these relationships and be alone, in the wild, where my destiny is only in the hands of nature and my own hands. Harsh as it would be, and I have had occasions to taste the mercilessness and danger of nature, the harshest experience is to be alone, I think. To learn about life, to discover its values, to draw conclusions about life, and to do all this all alone. That's why so many of us are stuck to the Internet, to build these connections that might be important to us without weighing us down, tying us to a place when our hearts want to go somewhere else.
So I have sat alone in many deserts, on many mountain tops, listening to the waves of many seas, and the feeling of freedom and desire for connection face off in dramas I still can't understand. In the movie, one character said, "To forgive is to love, and to love is to connect with God." God, as in that which is around us. Love and happiness somehow go hand in hand, and at this stage in my life, I suddenly can't find that connection between the two. It's hard to really love if there isn't a human being to love. It's possible to love nature, to love its beauty. I have even fallen in love, that feeling of falling in love, when I was this foreign visitor in nature.
But I couldn't touch that nature the way I would want to touch another human being, a parent, a sibling, a friend, a lover. And if I were dying from starvation, or panicking from fear, nature's beauty wouldn't bring me solace the way a human would.
But what human? That's the problem. Nature has its own ways, and never the fickle way, never the betrayal. I don't know why. But with people, it's harder to say. It's harder to count on. The man in the movie felt he had been betrayed by his parents, by the life he hadn't made for himself, and that by running into nature, he was seeking a rebirth. And me? I sit in my house that sometimes feels like a shackle. I have a job that makes me feel I am not doing what I truly want. And I have to deal with friends and family that don't always feel like the anchor I wish them to be.
But the message is always about love. And therein I will need to find the answers to these dilemmas.
