Leaving the Trail: On Loss and Abundance

Our last night on the trail

For the past four and a half months I’ve thought about the day, the exact moment I would touch the southern terminus of the PCT. Perhaps more so, I thought about the day I would return to my home, with 2600 miles of growth, stories and ultimately success. 

I love adventures, and despite knowing that the pursuit of a goal is often more rewarding than achieving one, I’m always thinking about their end – the finish line. I collect experiences, and I can’t collect another until this one is over. Plus this one was pretty painful. So many nights in the tent, waking up every 30 mins to roll over, hoping to alleviate the aching in my hips for just a few seconds. So many mornings, exhausted with nothing to look forward to but 25 more miles of throbbing in my feet and fire in my lungs. So many meals out of a bag or a gas station. So many wet and cold mornings in overgrown sections. So many rocks, mosquitoes, gnats. Every day I looked forward to getting back to my life, to my little family I was creating, to my work. To my bed. 

I could not wait to go home, to unpack my things. To live out of a house instead of a bag or hotel or car. I wanted my clothes and books, my kitchen and pantry, my couch and my dock, my wine fridge – and perhaps most of all my laptop. 

Which is why I couldn’t understand it when I got home earlier this month, surrounded by the abundance of my life that I so desperately missed, crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep. 

“I don’t want to be here.” I repeated to my very confused partner.  

I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be on the trail. I wanted to be back in the tent with the cold and the ache in my hips. I wanted to be on side trail looking for water. I wanted to be cursing and heaving up a mountainside, unsure if I’d make it to the top. I wasn’t done with what I had set out to do. I hadn’t touched the terminus, I hadn’t crossed the country on foot.  

Being home, on that day, with all that abundance, meant I had lost. 

I had lost months on the trail. I had lost the experience of thru-hiking. And I had lost a woman I loved. 

The next day, unpacking Cathy’s crystal, listening to the rolling stones, I felt too many connections between loss and abundance. I started to get that uneasy squeeze on my heart, the kind you get when feeling two conflicting emotions. When you’re trying to decide which one to feel. 

I remembered that Pooh Bear quote…

I realized I missed the trail in part because of the abundance of it – the time and healing it provided. The space to move and grow and connect. The challenge, the work, the glory of the grind it provided. We often think of hiking as stripping down to the essentials, sacrificing things that we don’t really need - the loss of so much. As it turns out the trail was both of those things – a loss of so much, and abundance of so much else.

Likewise, every life is abundant, with joy, pain, love, and growth. And every life ends with loss. 

We may think there is no room for both loss and abundance. We push through grief with platitudes, looking for the silver linings, to remember how much we have (usually in comparison to others). We feel guilty for feeling loss because we know we still have so much. 

But loss and abundance are not conflicting states, they’re complements. It’s not impossible or even weird for them to exist at the same time, it is the only way they can exist. One doesn’t make sense without the other. When we feel loss, abundance isn’t there to make us feel guilty for or ignore our pain. It’s there to comfort us, to balance us. 

We were supposed to have finished the trail this week. I had a flight for tomorrow to fly home to my mother’s home. To bask in the warm of a job completed, to observe (or participate) in the ad hoc annual wrestling match, and listen to my loud aunt tell me I never came home enough. 

I feel that loss. 

Instead I’m preparing too much food for the people I love. I’m fresh from a vacation of lots of people and food and wine and thinking. I’m staring at a list of projects that require and nurture my passion and sense of work. I’m coming off a sabbatical of privilege and growth. 

I feel that abundance. 

When I think too hard, I feel the conflict between the two. I start to wonder what it means, which wins, which is more important, more powerful, more authentic, more meaningful, more useful or more “good.”

When I don’t think too hard. When I just feel one, then the other, and then both. I’m balanced. I’m grateful.

I’m thankful.