Into the Wild

I just watched Into the Wild, a 2007 film based on the life of Christopher McCandless. Chris is a top student, but in an act of rebellion agaisnt everythibg he sees as wrong with society, including his parents, whom he perceives as materialistic, manipulative, and domineering, McCandless destroys all of his credit cards and identification documents, donates $24,000 (nearly his entire savings) to Oxfam, and sets out on a off to travel alone to Alaska and experience its nature firsthand.

Along the way, he abandons his automobile in the course of a flash flood, to hitchhike after burning the remainder of his dwindling cash supply. He acquires a Perception Sundance 12 open-water kayak and goes down the Colorado River, into Mexico, and later returns to America via freight train to Los Angeles.
He encounters many unconventional individuals along the way, such as a group of hippies, a farm owner and a lonely leather worker who offers to adopt and be a grandfather to McCandless. McCandless purposefully trudges onward to his final destination, arriving in the wilds of Alaska nearly two years after his initial departure.

The thing that I found so tragic about this story was that McCandless’ quest for meaning was to be found all around him, yet he persisted to go to Alaska in search of it. He met great people whose lives he influenced – he seemed to be a really nice guy. His thoughts at the time can be summarized in one of his statements to one of the people he meets: “I will miss you too, but you are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience. People just need to change the way they look at things.”

He seems driven to through off what he perceives as a straightjacket of materialism and people.

He starts living in a Bus, used as a shelter for moose hunters. McCandless finds joy in living off the land and begins to write a book of his adventures. As the spring thaw arrives and he seeks to return from the wild, McCandless is cut off from civilization by the torrents of a swelled river. As his food supply of small game dwindles, he resorts to eating indigenous plants. Although he consults a book that he brought along in order to identify edible plants in the wild, he confuses an edible and a poisonous variety, which shuts down his digestive system and causes him to starve to death.

It is not until he is dying that he realises that it is all about the relationships you form along the way. His dying words written in his journal are: Happiness is only real when shared.

In other words, what he was searching for, he ignored in his quest to find it.
How often do we do the same thing though? We are so determined to get to the goal, but the life God is wanting us to live is around us waiting for us to engage with it. More specifically, we should not relentlessly pursue any goal, no matter how noble, at the expense of our relationships – with God and with others.

Perhaps just a little reminder that the time and energy we invest into relationships, even it is across the world, are worth it.