What is The Ridge Beyond?

From all the time I have spent in the outdoors I keep getting reminded what a gift it is to be able to experience life. It is hard to describe how incredible something like life actually is since it is present in everything we do, and therefore easy to forget and put to the side as a background item. I have found it is so easy to become numbed to the truth of what life is that it is often near impossible not to take it for granted.

Yet, every time I return to the outdoors, I am reminded how incredible it is to wake up each day. Life is filled with so much potential and possibilities beyond what I can imagine, and it would be one of the biggest shames for me to not make the most of it.

Every good gift should be cherished and used. No one takes the gift of a lifetime and tosses it to the side to never think about again. I think this is even more true for the greatest gift of all- life itself. It leads me on to think about how to respond to this - how do I make the most of the life I have?

I believe it is my duty to continually learn and grow in everything I do in order to live up to the possibility of what I can be achieved in life. Life is the single greatest opportunity laid before me and it would be arrogant for me to not take that seriously.

So, in an attempt to explore the meaning of this offer, I turn back to the same place the thought began. As much as the outdoors is a wonderful setting for pondering and reflection, it is also filled with its own unique collection challenges and difficulties, and few things do as good a job as hard times and challenge to promote growth and lessons learned. This is one of the reasons I keep returning to the wild.

I have been lucky enough to have had many different and varied experiences from hiking trips, canoeing expeditions and camping in stunningly remote places, and as I continue to reflect on them all I have found great value in each.

Through time and repeat exposure to these lessons I have started to develop a series of philosophies or wisdoms that I often live by, or explain my actions through. However, as beneficial as they have been for me, I think wisdom is made to be shared. How disappointing would it be if a man died with the worlds greatest wisdom and never had a chance to pass it on?

Now, I am not claiming to have the worlds greatest wisdom, after all I am still very much in the early stages of my learning, but I have found that some of the thoughts I have taken home from these trips have not only helped me, but also been useful to those around me.

That is where The Ridge Beyond comes in. Since most people haven’t spent the same time in the wild places where these ideas originate, it is often difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t understand the context. but why should they be excluded from benefiting from it?

It isn’t possible to bring everyone to where these lessons where born. Instead, the purpose of this project is to document these hard days of growth, the reflection that follows, and then the lessons that sprout from them as I journey through and uncover them myself, and then share them onwards alongside the context of where they came.

If anyone following along what I am doing takes away something which makes their life a little easier, or their hard moments a little more bearable, then this project will have succeeded in its purpose. So, as I go and explore this life, experience what it has to offer, and embrace whatever truth it has in store for me, stick around and see it all for yourself!