The End Of The Journey By Cheryl Strayed

Step after step after step. After step. The heat is barren and the weight of this backpack is too much for these shoulders. Giving up is the only thing on this hiker’s mind. However, change is at the end of the journey, and a chance to start over and become someone new. While hiking, Cheryl Strayed said that, “It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.” Hair, clothes, personality, and people all change. Without it identity would be impossible to discover and talent would never be found. There have been many inspirational figures that have shown their hard journeys to become what they are. The most interesting one is about Cheryl Strayed. “Her mother’s death from cancer devastated Strayed, and

Cheryl took all the money she had and invested it into hiking supplies and gear. Strayed had not been backpacking once (Shapiro, D). Sooner than later, she was ready to hike one of the longest trails in North America, the Pacific Crest Trail or PCT. Every step of the way Cheryl was, “riding her horse into battle”. When something went wrong, she learned from it. And that is exactly what “deep practice” is- messing up to master something. At the start of Cheryl’s 1,100 mile- long backbreaking endeavor, Cheryl moved slow and tedious. Her feet blistered and legs wobbled. By the end of it, she learned how to move efficiently; “I’d hiked only 170 so far, but my pace was picking up,” (Wild, 2012, p. 136). In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle explains that these errors were allowing people like Cheryl Strayed to succeed through these challenges (Coyle,

Even her last name switched from Nyland to Strayed, something she thought fit her better (Cheryl Strayed). After her crazy, three- month expedition, Cheryl learned: tolerance, patience, and that, as Coyle would put it, “Making progress became a matter of small failures,” (Coyle, 2009, p. 13). As soon as Cheryl was off the PCT, her civil life took a 360. Strayed got re-married, earned a degree in fiction writing, and even had a child! Today, Cheryl has written multiple books about her achievement. And, more recently, her New York Times best seller, Wild, is being made into a movie (Cheryl