Wanderlust

In the year of 2018, I decided I needed something new. I was successful in my career at Xbox/Microsoft. My survival needs were taken care of. However, when it came to choosing a career trajectory, I was missing a critical component necessary for making the best life decisions- I didn’t know who I was, what I liked, what made me soar. What I needed to do, I told myself, was explore the world.

And so I did! By July of 2018, I got rid of all my things: my car, my PC, my Xbox, my couch, my bed, my apartment… And I took a plane to a place where I knew hardly anything about- Thailand.

I hopped from hostel to hostel, meeting all sorts of interesting people. All the while, I was still working at Minecraft, writing code to provide new insights for the Minecraft Data team back in Redmond, WA remotely. Indeed, it was miraculous!

The countries I visited during my trip were: Thailand, Singapore, Cambodia, South Korea, Japan, and Sweden. I came back home a year after I had left, in 2019.

After I came back, I quit my job after that to enter into a new phase of self-exploration: thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail! I walked 760 miles across the cascades from the Canadian terminus all the way across the state of Washington and around half of the state of Oregon. That’s about one-third of the entire trail.

Enter, Trail Magic

Even after all of that wandering, I was still on the path to a deeper understanding of the world and myself. But along that journey, I found a joyous something. That something is called Trail Magic.

In the thru-hiking community, there is a culture of mutual assistance and oneness with nature. The culture is contagious, too. When that culture spreads to such an extent that someone from off of the trail will assist hikers out of radical kindness, we call that “trail magic”.

On my trip, someone set up a tent in the middle of the woods, and projected the movie Starship Troopers for the hikers during the night. In the morning they cooked breakfast for all of the hikers passing through! This handiwork is a prime example of “trail magic”.

Trail magic uplifts the spirit. Life on the Pacific Crest Trail is brutal, you are periodically bombarded with swarms of mosquitos, your feet are often cold and wet with lots of accompanying dangers, and you are often burning more than 6,000 calories every day. I remember one morning waking up at 2AM just so I could make it into town before the breakfast place in the next town closed because I needed to eat lots of eggs. You get so so hungry that you dream in food. And when you finally get the said food, you can feel the care and energy that went into every aspect of its creation, and you get a deep sense of appreciation.

When food comes from trail magic, however, well… that’s the best food I’ve ever tasted! You look at the entire Universe, violence and everything, and you get a feeling that is not describable in words, but provides the grace you need to continue on your journey.

A Cairn, A Symbol

Hikers, an introspective bunch, will often leave you cairns- mounds of stone stacked on top of one another. Hikers will lay the stones to show you the way to your physical destination, but in doing so, is yet another instance of trail magic. Cairns are an elegant symbol with a deeply profound meaning: the meaning of helping others. Cairns not only show you the way to a physical destination, but to a way of being: the way of giving.

Here is a cairn just for you:

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  (___)
 (_____)
(_______)

Be more like a cairn, dear reader. Think about trail magic.