Inspire (Life Lessons from the Wilderness) by Ben Fogle
Ben Fogle is well-known from his TV exploits, most notably his long running series of ‘New Lives in the Wild’ where he spends a week living with people who as they say life off the grid. This book though written during the lockdowns is a longer reflection on his exploration, challenges and most importantly his self-discovery through all of the things he has encountered in life.
One of the running themes through the book comes from the Japanese art of kintsugi which would take a broken piece of pottery and repair it using gold to make a something even more valuable than the initial item despite its’ obvious flaws and repairs. And this is clearly a parallel to say we are all broken vases hwere the repairs build character, strength and spirit.
In his own story he relates this to his adventures and his misadventures in the place he calls home, the wilderness. This is the place that has taught him to deal with love and loss, criticism and failure but also, happiness and sorrow. It is the ting that has helped him be resilient, to manage risk and to live in hope.
His story would mirror many aspects of everyone’s life. Life goes up and down and Fogle has reflected on his own life in these terms to learn from his own failings and weaknesses. And failings have been no stranger to Fogle in his life so much so that he says his life has been ‘defined by the pain of failure’.
However, he sees failure now as very different from years ago defined sadly by social media where just a swipe denotes success or failure where it is easy to pick holes and point out shortcomings. This he believes means that people worry about what is happening in other people’s lives that they fail to enjoy their own. This is why he calls the wilderness ‘his safe place’, a pace to retreat from the pressures of daily life. Indeed, he notes that those he has visited, for example, never wear a watch.
As someone who has clearly received a fair amount of criticism he says that when you have self-doubt and you layer on top the pessimists, the naysayers and the intense scrutiny, you have a perfect storm for doubt and baseless anxiety. The wilderness is for him the place where there is no hate, no anger but a place that he accepts can be dangerous and even brutal. But his experience from those who live off grid so to speak is that they have a higher level of happiness and contentment which he sees as missing from those who live an urban life.
In the book he does this by recounting his adventures with various aspects of the wilderness he has encountered over the years so there are chapters on the sea, the ice cap, rivers, islands, the jungle, the desert, people, wildlife and mountains.
This is a fairly easy read but very poignant and I found I could relate personally to a lot of what he says for he is honest. For example, he is passionate about doing something about climate change but happily admits he is a hypocrite as his work does give him a larger carbon footprint that most but what he does not is that relatively speaking those who choose to live off grid do have a substantially reduced footprint. But then again, he recognises that not everyone can do that either.
This is a book about life, its ups and downs, its contradictions, its restrictions and its opportunities. It was a really uplifting book and something will resonate with everyone.