It’s been a year or so since I first chanced upon Eva zu Beck‘s YouTube channel, where she regularly posts videos ranging from ten minutes long to an hour plus, documenting excursions taken around the world by boat, on foot, or in her 2006 Land Rover Defender 110 named Odyssey, with only her dog Vilk as her companion.
Tagging along on her adventures from the comfort of my fully on-grid and air-conditioned home, much like the rest of her 1.92M+ subscribers, I’ve been inspired by the “you can do this too” open-door nature of her content, which she’s stayed true to even after landing a deal with National Geographic for her own travel show, “Superskilled,” and announcing that her first memoir, “The Wilder Way” was to be released by the Simon & Schuster imprint Gallery Books in June.
In “The Wilder Way,” zu Beck writes candidly of the fast marriage and even faster divorce that tipped the scales between the life she’d been raised to believe she should have, and the life of wild, solo adventure she craved. Describing her transition from being a well-off corporate executive living in London to traveling the Mongolian wilderness, the Arctic Circle, and just about every other place under the sun, she effectively does so in such a way as to make the reader not only believe that such adventures are a possibility, but also a soul-enriching necessity — a call-to-action to not let one more day be wasted in the mindset of “I could never,” or “maybe one day.”
“What I hope for when people see my content is not for people to overhaul their lives, but to make small shifts,” zu Beck writes in a recent essay for The Skylark. “It doesn’t have to be radical, for many people it should not be. But to live a life that is slightly more authentic to their true selves.”
Reading “The Wilder Way” might not overhaul your life, but it will surely help you see how easily a fuller one can be had.
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