Ben Fogle - Inspire

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright Ben Fogle 2020

Ben Fogle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover image Jack Watson

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008374037

Ebook Edition October 2020 ISBN: 9780008374051

Version: 2020-09-19

To you

I hope that this book will help you find confidence,

hope and happiness

Spring 2020

A treehouse in Oxfordshire

Dear Reader,

I always had a plan.

In the event of a global crisis, I would retreat to the wilderness, an island in Scotland perhaps, where I would cultivate my own produce and home-school my children from our idyllic little croft far away from the crisis.

And now, the unimaginable has happened and I find myself in lockdown, isolated from the isolation of the Western Isles. Instead I am sitting in my new office, the childrens treehouse at home, which has been requisitioned for the duration.

Like so many people, I have fought my own mental and physical battles in isolation. Keeping the dark clouds away before they have a chance to form into a storm. And also taking this time to become more introspective. Away from the bombardment of ever-changing information, lockdown has given me the opportunity to reflect and scrutinise what I have done, what I am doing and where Im going.

All my life I have been running from an inner voice of doubt, the loud voice of failure and disaster that goads me and taunts me with its negativity and hopelessness. I have spent a lifetime trying to silence the pessimism by taking myself out of my comfort zone and out into nature, where I get perspective and direction.

Sometimes it takes a jolt like a world crisis to shock us from the slumber of complacency and remind us what is really important in life.

Many of us spend our lives searching for something that is often right under our noses all along a sense of belonging. This sense of belonging brings contentment, inclusion and happiness that eludes many for their entire lives. They say home is where the heart is. The wilderness and nature is all our home a place where we can all belong.

For me, one of the most powerful forms of escape has been to think about the people, the places and landscapes of my life. I find myself disappearing from the chaos of the kitchen table, back to the mountains and forests, the jungles and islands, the open seas and polar ice caps, to rediscover the wilderness within.

There is so much we can learn about ourselves in the wilderness.

The wilderness forces us to rise to the challenge. To take responsibility for ourselves and adapt. We become more creative, less wasteful and more empathetic. In short, it makes us less selfish and more selfless.

Lockdown has given us all a period of retrospective reflection. What have we been doing? Where have we come from and where are we going? Without the background noise it has given us all an opportunity for contemplation. And I have been contemplating all the lessons I have learned from the wilderness, and the way my experiences in nature have shaped me.

This book was born from of the experiences of re-wilding myself. Written on my lap in the childrens treehouse during the extraordinary period of lockdown isolation, here are lessons to inspire your own journey and a sense of destination.

Ben

The wilderness holds answers to questions we have not yet learned to ask.

Nancy Newhall

This much I know.

Its easier to break something than it is to repair it. A falling china vase will smash into a thousand pieces in milliseconds. Of course it can be repaired, but those repairs require patience, skill and perseverance. It might take months or even years to carefully piece it back together, and even then you are left with a damaged vase, forever marked by the scars of repair.

Beauty of course is in the eye of the beholder. While some see only the scarring, others see beauty. It was the Japanese who invented the art of kintsugi, whereby porcelain repaired with gold becomes an art form and the finished product becomes even more valuable and covetable, each vein, line and repair representing hours of dedication and artistic craft. By embracing its flaws and imperfections, the item, a vase, for example, has appreciated in worth because of the trials and tribulations in repairing it.

Life is full of ups and downs, light and shade, peaks and troughs. In essence, we are all damaged vases, and the repairs build character and strength and spirit. We all seek healing in different places. Nothing is truly ever broken.

Throughout my life, the wilderness has been my healer. She is my friend and my mentor. I am not a religious person but, if I was, nature would be my church. My place of worship.

Nature has taught me respect and compassion. The wild teaches you the importance of valuing and rationing your resources, of caring for your environment, and of respecting nature. She has reminded me to be thankful for what I have rather than sorrowful for what I dont.

Throughout my life, through a series of adventures and misadventures, I have learned a great deal about myself through the theatre of nature. The wilderness has taught me how to deal with love and loss, with criticism and failure, with happiness and sorrow, with resilience and risk, aspiration and hope.

What goes up must come down. Its the reality of life. Summiting Everest marked a high point in my life on many different levels, but the reality was that I eventually had to come back down. I couldnt stay up there forever. Like a drug-induced high, there has to be a comedown.

In reality, my whole life has been a series of highs and lows. As a positive person I often skirt over the low points, but the year since climbing the highest mountain in the world has taught me a lesson about myself, about life and the importance of learning from our own failings and our weaknesses.

My childhood was dominated by failure: not always in obvious ways, but failings of one kind or another seemed to follow me like a bad smell. I failed my exams. I failed at friendships. I failed at sport. Deep down, this has scared me and it still scares me. I became failure and failure became me. It defined me as a person. I stopped trying because I knew Id fail. There was no point. The last 45 years have been quite a rollercoaster. I dont want to sound too clichd, but if Im honest, my life has been defined by the pain of failure. The inevitability of this failure stripped me of confidence and self-esteem and crushed my spirit. And so, as a child, I found myself retreating to the trees and to the river bank and seashore as a form of therapy to try to rebuild that shattered confidence. As I grew older, the scale and scope of my relationship with nature and the wilderness would continue to grow and develop.