Tracking A Path
Our ancestors were trackers. For millions of years, humans have followed pathways with their embodied senses, uncovering meaningful information and crafting stories of significance as they tracked their way toward nourishment and fulfillment. Our evolutionary development has gifted us with incredible capacities to track what is meaningful in our lives.
It is inevitable that our tracking will sometimes lead us down the wrong path. This is not a mistake that deserves punishment, from self or others; it is simply an experience to learn from. Mastery of tracking comes from taking many such paths, with humility and focus, and weaving them together with skillful discernment. Each wrong turn leads us back to the last known meaningful place, where we gather up all we’ve learned and seek the next thread of our story. With each step forward, we carry a bit more confidence, a little more compassion. The pattern of our life becomes more discernible, more vivid.
Wisdom emerges when experience is integrated and embodied, so that patterns and meaning-making intertwine in a creative, fulfilling dance of wonder. Curiosity, courage, and excitement propel us toward ever-unfolding paths of meaning until we reach a place of fulfillment, a momentary rest within the greater quest. But as the tracker within knows too well, the journey of meaning-making and story-weaving never ends. We seek out nourishment until our final days.
The wise tracker eventually comes to understand that true fulfillment lies within the journey itself. They offer themselves to the regenerative qualities of wonder and gratitude, while gently striving for peace, prosperity, and the passionate joy found in the process.
For individuals, learning to track your own life is a journey into the self and to create a new vision for your life. It is the way to find your community and your place in it; to find your way into your own wild nature and in doing so, to find your way home at last.
— Boyd Varty