Wisdom from Cheryl Strayed

Her hiking boots were too small. “My feet were dotted with an ever-increasing number of blisters,” reported Cheryl Strayed. “I sat in the dirt examining them, knowing there was little I could do to prevent the blisters from going from bad to worse.”

Her backpack was much too heavy. “My hips and shoulders were covered with blisters and rashes, inflamed welts and dark scabs where my skin had broken open from being chafed by my pack,” Strayed wrote in her book Wild—From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

She was woefully unprepared, but Strayed was determined. She survived rattlesnakes and bears, heat and snow, to hike 1,100 miles by herself on the Pacific Crest Trail.

She learned that she could do what she thought she couldn’t do, Strayed recently concluded in an interview on “Think,” a National Public Radio program on the North Texas station KERA.

How do you do what you think you can’t do? You have to be resilient, Strayed said. And, you have “to manage one thing at a time.”