EXPERIENCE
It took a three-year hike around the world for author Sarah Wilson to realise that challenging society’s expectations – and herself – is what makes her feel fully alive
A few years ago, in my mid-forties, I set off around the world for three years with one carry-on backpack. I was single, childless and thoroughly overwhelmed by what I referred to as the ‘planetary clusterf *ck’ – the unfathomably complex melange of the climate crisis, social fragmentation, conspiracy theories, gender and race wars and the painful loneliness and disconnection we were all feeling (and this was before Covid-19 hit). Somehow, it made sense to strip myself of all belongings and head off into the unknown.
It made little sense, however, to those around me who, I think, felt that this is not what a woman of such an age should be doing. At 44, you are meant to be settled, to have landed. Or be making last-ditch attempts to do so before all reproductive opportunities dry up.
I knew this. But I also knew that life no longer made much sense.
I had been putting a lot of time into climate activism. I watched scientists come out with warnings, which most of the world dismissed as hysteria, all the while expressing an odd outrage at the droughts, fires and floods that filled headlines. I observed suicide rates going up, kids experiencing more anxiety, families becoming sucked into working harder to pay for exorbitant mor tgages and school fees, and unable to… just stop.
I had also become lonely and anxious myself. The husband-andkids package had eluded me and I felt I didn’t belong at the dinner parties where everyone talked property prices.
But, in many ways, the nonsense-ness of what was going on around me gave me a wild permission to abandon the rules that apply to a middle-aged woman, or to any system-conforming adult, and, well, to just do life differently. I remember riding my bike across the city late one evening and thinking, ‘If this is my life situation, then why don’t I totally own it?’
Now, I should say, this decision was not an entirely unfamiliar one for me. I moved out of home at 17 and left Australia at 18 to hitchhike around Europe for a year. Since then, I’ve lived all around the world and mostly out of one bag.
I’ve always been drawn to freedom over stability. But there was something else that guided me, or pushed me. I’d had a sense of it when I set off. But it really only hit me about 18 months into the journey – I was seeking my edge.
The American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön prescribes going to your edge as a way to reconnect back to what matters. ‘Life is a whole journey of meeting your edge again and again,’ she writes in The Wisdom Of No Escape. ‘That’s where, if you’re a person who wants to live, you start to ask yours
