The Wild Self Within
The art of extending a metaphor is a special gift. Writing a story that keeps the reader ravenously wanting more while threading in bits of wisdom and practical advice is no easy feat. When done well, classics are written. The iconic Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind, but Boyd Varty’s The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life also fits the bill.
Boyd is a tracker based at the Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa. He’s been schooled in ancient tracking methods, and his book beautifully does two things:
Invites the reader on an adventure into the rugged bush of South Africa with his two friends and mentors, Alex and Renias, to experience the nearly extinct sense of human wildness.
Helps the reader discover his purpose through the art of tracking — recognizing subtle clues that illuminate a path previously unseen.
In less than 150 pages, Boyd seamlessly connects the wildness of nature to the challenges of modern human life.
Everything in nature knows how to be itself. Varty points out that “no animal has ever participated in a should,” aside from us humans, of course. Leopards, for example, “from birth know they are keepers of solitude.” But we, humans, are influenced by cultural stories, which cause us to rationalize away the very experiences that would be most fulfilling.
We successfully convince ourselves that we’re above nature and that nature is something we observe when we go hiking or escape the city and suburbs for a camping trip. But Boyd reminds us that we are not witnessing nature; we’re part of it. Inside each of us, behind all the social conditioning, is the “wild self.”
The wild self can be found by developing track awareness. When on the trail of a pride of lions, “tracking is a function of directing attention, bringing our awareness back to this subtle inner trail of the wild self, and learning to see its path.”
We experience the outer, modern world much more vividly than the inner world. Thus, we tend to overemphasize desire and materialism while spending less time connecting with the wild nature that lurks inside us. It’s easy to lose our inner selves and submit to unhealthy habits, routines, and relationships.
But going through the motions is an empty life. Looking to others to “define our path, value, and purpose” won’t result in fulfillment. “Shoulds are full of traps…laid by society and your limited rules for yourself.” A great tracker can ask essential questions to help find the first track:
How do you know you love something?
How do you feel when you are fully expressing yourself?
You have to do the work - “you can’t skip past the creating to the creation.” The great trackers weren’t born being able to construct great stories based on animal imprints — it’s a skill developed over years of practice. You have to find the first track first.
“Teaching is not spoken but absorbed.”
Boyd learned from his friends Alex and Renias — two expert trackers. They became his mentors, but not in a formal way. He didn’t attend classes or take notes on their lectures. He observed, participated, and absorbed. It wasn’t their instruction that taught Boyd; it was through their essence, captured by sleeping under the stars, walking, talking, and laughing with them, that Boyd learned to see things he was once blind to.
A “greater aliveness” is available to all of us, but only if we’re open to finding that first track. By seeking, we can get off autopilot and start participating in life instead of simply existing in it — finding enjoyment in life’s little moments, not just the grandiosity.
Alex and Renias guided Boyd on how to reach the destination without knowing where it was at the onset. This way of living, of listening to the whisper of the wild self, of finding the zest in the routine, of triggering states of flow, of following intuitions — can illume pathways that were lost in the void of darkness.
The only wrong choice is not to make one.
