Tracking and Track Awareness
Scope: Boyd Varty’s method for finding purpose in The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life: treating a calling as a trail to be read through attention, body signals and small first steps, rather than a destination to be reasoned out. For the broader convergence of purpose frameworks, see The Purposeful Life.
The Premise: A Wild Self That Knows
Varty grew up on a South African game reserve and learned to track alongside the trackers he calls Renias and Alex. His premise: “nothing in the wild needs a coach to help it discover what it truly is,” so if we are lost in “value, direction, and belonging” it is because we have lost contact with something instinctual. “Inside you is the wild part of you that knows what your gift, purpose, and mission are. That part of you is wild and elusive. It cannot be captured, as it is always evolving. To live on its trail, you must become a tracker.” The native “medicine way” is “something that only you can give to the world.”
Track Awareness
Track awareness is the central skill: “how attuned you are to what is around you. It is recognizing a track when it appears. It is teaching yourself how to see what is important to you.” Three features distinguish it from standard purpose methods:
- Not rational. “You can’t think your way to a calling.” It means following “the inner tracks of your feelings, sensations, and instincts, the integrity and truth that are deeper than ideas about what you should do.”
- Body as instrument. Modern culture, “obsessed with thinking,” has forgotten the body’s guidance: “the way it relaxes and opens when something feels right, the contraction and tightness when we are not where we are meant to be.” Practical rule: “Track what makes you feel good and bring more of it into your life. Notice what makes you feel lousy and do less of it.” (Compare Embodied Cognition and The Feeling Brain.)
- Wake-up precedes the call. Many men “feel like they are sleepwalking through their lives.” The journey “will begin not with the call but with the desire to hear the call,” and attention is the mechanism for waking.
First Tracks
“If you can see your whole life’s path laid out then it’s not your life’s path” (Campbell). Trails arrive as “first tracks. Then next first tracks.” Varty confesses he struggled to “dial huge possibilities into small practical actions” and had to learn “to be in the process of transformation, not trying to be transformed.” The mantra, taken from Renias: “I don’t know where we are going but I know exactly how to get there.” This is the same logic as process over outcomes, approached from intuition rather than goal-setting.
The Path of Not Here: Losing the Track
The book’s most reusable protocol, a decision procedure for being lost:
- Accept that “losing the track is part of tracking.”
- Go back to the last clear track; “there is information there.”
- Check open terrain and bare ground; open your focus.
- “Any place you don’t find a track is not wasted, but part of refining where to look.”
- “Flow for a while on your best guess, alert, listening, noticing.”
Trackers “try things”: a process of “elimination, inquiry, confirmation; a process of discovery and feedback.” People who say “When I know exactly what the next thing is, I will make a move” freeze. “The path of not here is part of the path of here.” On choices: “the only mistake is to not make any choice”; the lesson “is more about discovery than being correct.” Varty notes coaching “is just a kind of inner tracking,” and that a coach’s core premise is that “your beliefs about life are not reality.”
Culture as Borrowed Track
Seeing someone without your social programming “forces you to see that a huge part of what you might think of as ‘this is how I am’ … is not you at all but patterns of behavior and thinking you have adopted from the cultural story.” Related: “The hazard of modern times is the danger of no danger,” and “Fearfulness is the most common state in a life that asks for no real courage.” Fear is treated as a teacher (“Let the fear bring you to life”), converging with Courage and the Fear Threshold.
Inherited Tracks and Mentorship
The father “is a track: a trail we choose to follow or a path we walk away from.” Renias’s violent father gave him hypervigilance that became both tracking skill and social attunement: “Trauma can travel, but so can healing.” Mentorship is “transmission born of physical proximity; the teaching is not spoken but absorbed” and is built on shared risk, not titles (Renias “never shamed or belittled” Alex after he fell and dropped his rifle).
Meaning, Flow and Enough
“People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive” (Campbell). Tracking “is a doorway into a flow state” and a purpose found this way merges “work, mission, and meaning” so that people “outwork everyone not from some kind of gritty determination, but from a place of pure pleasure.” Meaning “doesn’t want more”: from a place of “enough,” one acts in service. Under it sits a Zen-like presence (“When nothing is done, nothing is left undone”) and awe-then-humility: “the liberation from illusions of dominance, control, and power.”
A purpose method that converges with performance research
Varty (tracking), Stulberg (feeling one’s way into a rhythm, Excellence) and Coelho (omens) each treat the felt sense as the primary instrument for direction, with reasoning as a check rather than the source. Stulberg adds the guard-rail Varty lacks: simulate the future so that in-the-moment feelings do not mislead.
Passion-discovery versus fit-then-grit
Varty implies a calling is recognized through a pull. Stulberg is more cautious: passion “emerges over years, not seconds” and one should sample, then commit once “fit” appears. These are compatible only if “first tracks” are read as experiments, which is how Varty frames them.