500 Words a Week - A Lion Trackers Guide to Life

Boyd Varty’s book, “The Lion Trackers Guide to Life”, takes lessons he has learned from working with lion trackers and learning the process of tracking and applying these to our everyday life. One of my favourite podcast episodes was when he was on the Tim Ferris show. I spoke before about some of the takeaways from the podcast, but after reading the book recently, I was reminded of probably one of my favourite quotes/ ideas:

“I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there”.

One of the biggest things I’ve been battling with is uncertainty. What do the next 3 years, 5 years, 10 years look like? We can get endlessly bogged down in contemplating the future, that we are completely unaware of the present slipping through our fingertips. We’ve been constantly told that we must have our path figured out. That we must know all our next steps. Whereas the quote above speaks to the process of discovery over outcome. We don’t need to know our final destination. What we do need to do, is become attuned and aware to that which is happening around right here and now. We are constantly looking for signs to guide us. These signs we are looking for, are centring around what brings us joy and energy, what invigorates us, what are we passionate about. We then follow these signs, and these paths. We see where they lead us to. We are continuously open to exploring where our curiosity takes us.

“We live with our attention directed outward. We focus on the social cues of our culture. We look to others to define our path and value and purpose. We lose ourselves in should. Should’s are full of traps - traps laid by society and your limited rules for yourself. No one can tell you what your track will be or how to know what calls you and brings you to life.”

Throughout his book, Boyd keeps telling us that to truly find meaning we need to look inwards. We need to stop always focusing on the outside and on what we are told we should do. No one knows your path as well as you do, it’s just that we have stopped listening to ourselves. We’ve let the voices of others or society drown out that little voice or feeling inside showing us what it is that brings you to life.

A final quote/ thought from Boyd, is how he describes one the of the lion tracker’s he’s learned from, he calls him a master.

“To me a master is anyone who can be themselves in any situation. He has achieved one of the hardest things to achieve in our time: a freedom from judgement about how and who he should be”.

I think this is something we should spend more time focusing on, that final piece of the above quote.

Seeking freedom from judgement about how and who we should be.