From the beginning, I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have the certainty, it had me.

When I believed that all the things I’d been before had prepared me for this journey. But nothing had or could. Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed. And sometimes even the day before didn’t prepare me for what would happen next.

It made me think that everything was about to arrive - the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.

So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes of your life….I suppose I must be grateful, for I seem to have been headed this way all along.

I always knew I was destined for greatness.

I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel...

what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day I would look back on my life, and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate.

for I determined that if Death came he should find me ready

I know that somehow, every step I took since the moment I could walk was a step towards finding you.

Everything I’ve ever done, ever thought, ever experienced, and ever felt, has led me up to this moment in my life. And after accumulating and culminating it, all I can say is, “Ahhhhh!

All through my life, I have been tested. My will has been tested, my courage has been tested, my strength has been tested. Now my patience and endurance are being tested.

Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something.

I took everything as seriously as if I were immortal.

Like most children, I thought if I could face the worst danger voluntarily, and triumph, I would forever have power over it.