New Zealand: One day, one hour, one step at a time
On December 4, 2016, my husband Ben and I took a bus and then a hitchhike from Auckland to Cape Reinga, the northernmost point of New Zealand. After snapping a few photos by the iconic lighthouse, we started walking south and didn’t stop until we reached Stirling Point in Bluff, the southernmost point of the country on April 5. This 3,000-kilometer tramping trail is called Te Araroa, which is Maori for The Long Pathway. The route takes trampers (hikers) through New Zealand’s diverse terrains: sandy beaches, muddy forests, rolling farm pastures and remote mountains, to name a few.
The beauty of a through-hike is that you learn so much about yourself. I would say it’s an amazing metaphor for life, but in fact it is your life for several months, and one of the most simple. We woke up with the sun every morning and had one thing on our to-do list: walk. Our decisions were stripped down to the very basics such as when to eat; how to ration our food to make it last to the next resupply town; where to set up our tent; and what to do when weather conditions didn’t allow for safe hiking or river-crossing. We learned to listen to our bodies and trust our instincts.
One of the most important lessons I learned early on was to embrace the mud, or as our mantra went, “just go through the f***ing mud!” I found that the more you try to avoid it, jump over it or dance around it, the more likely you are to slip and fall into it. Sure, sometimes it’s deceivingly deep or slippery and you’ll fall anyway, but somehow it’s more bearable (fun, even!) when you choose to accept the risk and just go for it.
Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.
–Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Also like life, a through-hike doesn’t jump from highlight to highlight, like one might do on a shorter vacation. We certainly experienced plenty of awe-inspiring places, but we also walked a lot of trails that were less than spectacular, and even some highways that were downright terrible. We had amazing days, hard days, and a lot of mundane days in between.
There were times when I found myself dreading the mud, cursing the rain, fearing the challenging climbs or counting down to the next pretty highlight or restaurant meal. But I realized this kind of mindset caused me to miss out on a lot. With practice, I began to approach the adventure more like a meditation, focusing on one day, one hour, one step at a time. In doing this, I found even more awe in the spectacular, more grit in the challenge, more peace in the uncontrollable and more beauty in the in-between.
Have a yogic trip to share? E-mail us at editor@yoga-iowa.com. This article was originally published in YogaIowa’s Summer 2017 issue.
