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WE ALL GET IT. It’s the feeling that you’re not going anywhere, you’ve stalled, you’re a constant in a world of change. After seventeen years of staying well within my comfort zone (I’m an only child, it sort of comes naturally to me), I realised that it was time to step out, to take a challenge, and find out what happens. One day, this opportunity was handed to me on a plate, albeit a very big plate.
“Do you reckon you’re fit enough to walk the Kokoda Trail?”
“Heck yes!
It’s amazing how some of the best decisions we make in life are often ones we make without hesitation.
After two and a half months of training, which involved rising ridiculously early and jogging in the middle of winter, I set off. Two weeks later, after trekking through hot, humid and muddy Papuan jungle, I came back, I believe, a changed person. I felt I had become more confident, had greater self-esteem, and generally was able to function better in both my micro and macro societies. And due to a budding interest in psychology, the central aim of my PIP became the need to shed light on the ways in which my experience (walking the Kokoda Trail) had changed me as a person, compared to the other obvious group that were affected by the trail- the Australian soldiers who fought on it during the Kokoda Campaign of World War Two. Thus, the main body of my PIP became one of contrast- how the same piece of ground can harbour such different experiences, and can have such vastly different lasting effects on the people that walk “the bloody track.”
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