What is a Good Life? #185
Sarah Marquis on Fear, Instinct, and Surviving Alone in the Wild
Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring the big questions around what actually matters. Over the last 5 years, I have interviewed over 300 people around this question.
This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Sarah Marquis – the National Geographic explorer who walked 14,000km alone across Australia and author. She shares why fear is a construction we choose to believe, surviving a fall in Tasmania that left her crawling out of a gorge with a broken shoulder, and the grief that followed her mother’s sudden death. Sarah is a force of curiosity and nature – it was both a joy and inspiration to sit with her, so I suspect you’ll take a lot from this episode.
If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.
Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
Sarah Marquis has spent 25 years walking alone through some of the most remote landscapes on Earth. In length, her expeditions are the equivalent of circumnavigating the planet on foot.
In the clip below, she shares a story of breaking her shoulder and crawling her way out of a gorge for three days, only to be met by a thick forest. Then, in the midst of navigating her way through the dense forest and wondering if she will die there standing up, she yells out from somewhere deep within her, “I will never give up!”
When it came to the grief she experienced when her mother passed, she saw it as an expedition of another kind. She needed to be with it, whatever it was.
She began to closely observe and respect what the terrain of her experience was. She said something particularly striking to me.
“Everything was new, and I was like, okay, I guess I don’t sleep anymore. Okay, I guess I cannot have a conversation with anybody without crying.”
She mentioned that if she needed to cry for three days or two years, that is what she would do. She suggested that any time she encounters the unknown, it changes her – it allows her to grow in some way.
It brought me back to another interview I did a long time ago with Dr. Simon Western. He mentioned losing a brother when both he and his brother were very young, and the devastating effect that had on his family.
Even in moments when things were going well in his late teens, when he had lots of friends, a career he was interested in, and being a bit of a party animal – he used to go off on his own, and people couldn’t make sense of it. They’d wonder, “What is he doing?”
And he’d say, “You’ve got to go and discover your melancholy. You’ve got to be with your melancholy.”
He said that at the time he didn’t really know what he was saying, but later in life he realised the significance of this act.
“I got in touch with loss and grief, and it made me feel whole. I realised that something changed within me, and I could live again, or I could engage again in a different way.”
As I was wondering this morning what this week’s reflection would be about, I took a break to paint with my daughter. As I left my home to go back to the office, a moment from another interview with Bob Anderson came to me.
“When my dad died, I loved my dad so much. It was intense grief.
And the surprise was, as I dropped to the bottom of, or deep into, that grief, that sitting right there at the bottom of it was joy and gratitude. The joy of knowing a love that deep, that fierce, that would hurt me this much.
And so I think that’s a good life. We can more and more deeply become who we are.”
There is something quite poignantly beautiful and satisfying about the path to growth, wholeness, and becoming not being tied to some reframing or expediting.
Not muscling our way through, but knowing the experience as intimately as we can, without knowing where it is going.
It feels central to a good life.
2. This Week’s Questions
Is there something you are trying to force your way through that you need to sit with for longer?
What has grief taught you about yourself and about life?
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3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - Sarah Marquis on Fear, Instinct, and Surviving Alone in the Wild - What is a Good Life? #185
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Sarah Marquis below.
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About Me
I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.